[Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some analogical discussion of fatphobia, poorphobia, Islamophobia. This topic is personally enraging to me and I don't promise I can treat it fairly.]

I.

"How dare you compare x to y" it was pretty easy actually

— HRH Misha (@drethelin) August 22, 2014

I recently had a patient, a black guy from the worst part of Detroit, let’s call him Dan, who was telling me of his woes. He came from a really crappy family with a lot of problems, but he was trying really hard to make good. He was working two full-time minimum wage jobs, living off cheap noodles so he could save some money in the bank, trying to scrape a little bit of cash together. Unfortunately, he’d had a breakdown (see: him being in a psychiatric hospital), he was probably going to lose his jobs, and everything was coming tumbling down around him.

And he was getting a little philosophical about it, and he asked – I’m paraphrasing here – why haven’t things worked out for me? I’m hard-working, I’ve never missed a day of work until now, I’ve always given a hundred and ten percent. And meanwhile, I see all these rich white guys (“no offense, doctor,” he added, clearly overestimating the salary of a medical resident) who kind of coast through school, coast into college, end up with 9 – 4 desk jobs working for a friend of their father’s with excellent salaries and benefits, and if they need to miss a couple of days of work, whether it’s for a hospitalization or just to go on a cruise, nobody questions it one way or the other. I’m a harder worker than they are, he said – and I believed him – so how is that fair?

And of course, like most of the people I deal with at my job, there’s no good answer except maybe restructuring society from the ground up, so I gave him some platitudes about how it’s not his fault, told him about all the social services available to him, and gave him a pill to treat a biochemical condition almost completely orthogonal to his real problem.

And I’m still not sure what a good response to his question would have been. But later that night I was browsing the Internet and I was reminded of what the worse response humanly possible. It would go something like:

You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.

“Why do rich white kids who got legacy admissions to Yale receive cushy sinecures, but I have to work two grueling minimum wage jobs just to keep a roof over my head?” By even asking that question, you prove that you think of bosses as giant bags of money, rather than as individual human beings who are allowed to make their own choices. No one “owes” you money just because you say you “work hard”, and by complaining about this you’re proving you’re not really a hard worker at all. I’ve seen a lot of Hard Workers (TM) like you, and scratch their entitled surface and you find someone who thinks just because they punched a time card once everyone needs to bow down and worship them.

If you complain about “rich white kids who get legacy admissions to Yale,” you’re raising a huge red flag that you’re the kind of person who steals from their employer, and companies are exactly right to give you a wide berth.

Such a response would be so antisocial and unjust that it could only possibly come from the social justice movement.

II.

I’ve been thinking about “nice guys” lately for a couple of reasons.

First, I read Alas, A Blog‘s recent post on the subject, MRAs And Anti-Feminists Have Ruined Complaining About Being Single.

Second, I had yet another patient who -

(I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)

- I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.

So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”

“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”

“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.

“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.

“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”

“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” said Henry.

I wish, I wish I wish, that Henry was an isolated case. But he’s interesting more for his anomalously high number of victims than for the particular pattern.

Last time I talked about these experiences, one of my commenters linked me to what was later described as the only Theodore Dalrymple piece anyone ever links to. Most of the commenters saw a conservative guy trying to push an ideological point, and I guess that’s part of it. But for me it looked more like the story of a psychiatrist from an upper-middle-class background suddenly realizing how dysfunctional and screwed-up a lot of his patients are and having his mind recoil in horror from the fact – which is something I can sympathize with. Henry was the worst of a bad bunch, but nowhere near unique.

When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?”

There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time.

It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.”

It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”

Or to spell it out very carefully, Henry clearly has no trouble with women. He has been married five times and had multiple extra-marital affairs and pre-marital partners, many of whom were well aware of his past domestic violence convictions and knew exactly what they were getting into. Meanwhile, here I was, twenty-five years old, never been on a date in my life, every time I ask someone out I get laughed at, I’m constantly teased and mocked for being a virgin and a nerd whom no one could ever love, starting to develop a serious neurosis about it.

And here I was, tried my best never to be mean to anyone, gave to charity, pursuing a productive career, worked hard to help all of my friends. I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry.

No, I didn’t know Henry at the time. But everyone knows a Henry. Most people know several. Even three years ago, I knew there were Henry-like people – your abusers, your rapists, your bullies – and it wasn’t hard to notice that none of them seemed to be having the crushing loneliness problem I was suffering from.

And, like my patient Dan, I just wanted to know – how is this fair?

And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud, and that was how I learned about social justice.

III.

We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man, then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists, then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.

Ahem.

From Jezebel, “Why We Should Mock The Nice Guys Of OKCupid”:

Pathetic and infuriating in turns, the profiles selected for inclusion [on a site that searches OKCupid profiles for ones that express sadness at past lack of romantic relationships, then posts them publicly for mockery] elicit gasps and giggles – and they raise questions as well. Is it right to mock these aggrieved and clueless young men, particularly the ones who seem less enraged than sad and bewildered at their utter lack of sexual success?

What’s on offer isn’t just an opportunity to snort derisively at the socially awkward; it’s a chance to talk about the very real problem of male sexual entitlement. The great unifying theme of the curated profiles is indignation. These are young men who were told that if they were nice, then, as Laurie Penny puts it, they feel that women “must be obliged to have sex with them.” The subtext of virtually all of their profiles, the mournful and the bilious alike, is that these young men feel cheated. Raised to believe in a perverse social/sexual contract that promised access to women’s bodies in exchange for rote expressions of kindness, these boys have at least begun to learn that there is no Magic Sex Fairy. And while they’re still hopeful enough to put up a dating profile in the first place, the Nice Guys sabotage their chances of ever getting laid with their inability to conceal their own aggrieved self-righteousness.

So how should we respond, when, as Penny writes, “sexist dickwaddery puts photos on the internet and asks to be loved?” The short answer is that a lonely dickwad is still a dickwad; the fact that these guys are in genuine pain makes them more rather than less likely to mistreat the women they encounter.

From XOJane, Get Me Away From Good Guys:

Let’s tackle those good guys. You know, the aw shucks kind who say it’s just so hard getting a date or staying in a relationship, and they can’t imagine why they are single when they are, after all, such catches. They’re sensitive, you know. They totally care about the people around them, would absolutely rescue a drowning puppy if they saw one.

Why is it that so many “good guys” act like adult babies, and not in a fetish sense? They expect everyone else to pick up their slack, they’re inveterately lazy, and they seem genuinely shocked and surprised when people are unimpressed with their shenanigans. Their very heteronormativity betrays a shockingly narrow view of the world; ultimately, everything boils down to them and their needs, by which I mean their penises.

The nice guy, to me, is like the “good guy” leveled up. These are the kinds of people who say that other people just don’t understand them, and the lack of love in their lives is due to other people being shitty. Then they proceed to parade hateful statements, many of which are deeply misogynist, to explain how everyone else is to blame for their failures in life. A woman who has had 14 sexual partners is a slut. These are also the same guys who do things like going into a gym, or a school, or another space heavily populated by women, and opening fire. Because from that simmering sense of innate entitlement comes a feeling of being wronged when he doesn’t get what he wants, and he lives in a society where men are “supposed” to get what they want, and that simmer can boil over.

I’ve noted, too, that this kind of self-labeling comes up a lot in men engaging in grooming behavior. As part of their work to cultivate potential victims, they remind their victims on the regular that they’re “good guys” and the only ones who “truly” understand them.

From Feminspire, Nice Guy Syndrome And The Friend Zone:

I’m pretty sure everyone knows at least one Nice Guy. You know, those guys who think women only want to date assholes and just want be friends with the nice guys. These guys are plagued with what those of us who don’t suck call Nice Guy Syndrome.

It’s honestly one of the biggest loads of crap I’ve ever heard. Nice Guys are arrogant, egotistical, selfish douche bags who run around telling the world about how they’re the perfect boyfriend and they’re just so nice. But you know what? If these guys were genuinely nice, they wouldn’t be saying things like “the bitch stuck me in the friend zone because she only likes assholes.” Guess what? If she actually only liked assholes, then she would likely be super attracted to you because you are one.

Honestly. Is it really that unbearable to be friends with a person? Women don’t only exist to date or have sex with you. We are living, thinking creatures who maybe—just maybe—want to date and sex people we’re attracted to. And that doesn’t make any of us bitches. It makes us human.

From feministe, “Nice Guys”:

If a self-styled “Nice Guy” complains that the reason he can’t get laid is that women only like “jerks” who treat them badly, chances are he’s got a sense of entitlement on him the size of the Unisphere.

Guys who consider themselves “Nice Guys” tend to see women as an undifferentiated mass rather than as individuals. They also tend to see possession of a woman as a prize or a right…

A Nice Guy™ will insist that he’s doing everything perfectly right, and that women won’t subordinate themselves to him properly because he’s “Too Nice™,” meaning that he believes women deserve cruel treatment and he would like to be the one executing the cruelty.

However, Feministe is the first to show a glimmer of awareness (second, if you count Jezebel’s “I realize this might be construed as mean BUT I LOVE BEING MEAN” as “awareness”):

For the two hundredth time, when we’re talking about “nice guys,” we’re not talking about guys who are actually nice but suffer from shyness. That’s why the scare quotes. Try Nice Guys instead, if you prefer.

A shy, but decent and caring man is quite likely to complain that he doesn’t get as much attention from women as he’d like. A Nice Guy™ will complain that women don’t pay him the attention he deserves. The essence of the distinction is that the Nice Guy™ feels women are obligated to him, and the Nice Guy™ doesn’t actually respect or even like women. The clearest indication of which of the two you’re dealing with is whether the person is interested in the possibility that he’s doing something wrong.

Okay. Let’s extend our analogy from above.

It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.

No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.

I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!

I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia.

I don’t think I ever claimed to be, or felt, entitled to anything. Just wanted to know why it was that people like Henry could get five wives and I couldn’t get a single date. That was more than enough to get the “shut up you entitled rapist shitlord” cannon turned against me, with the person who was supposed to show up to give me the battery of tests to distinguish whether I was a poor minority or a Poor Minority nowhere to be seen. As a result I spent large portions of my teenage life traumatized and terrified and self-loathing and alone.

Some recent adorable Tumblr posts (1, 2) pointed out that not everyone who talks about social justice is a social justice warrior. There are also “social justice clerics, social justice rogues, social justice rangers, and social justice wizards”. Fair enough.

But there are also social justice chaotic evil undead lich necromancers.

And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”.

IV.

And so we come to Barry’s recent blog post:

In pop culture, everyone – or at least, everyone who isn’t a terrible human being – eventually meets someone wonderful and falls in love.

But in real life, that’s not how things always work. Some people don’t want romantic love at all. Others want romantic love but will never find it. That’s life. I’m beginning to accept, at age 45, that probably “true love” will never happen for me. I have a bunch of factors working against me – I’m physically conventionally unattractive, I badly lack confidence, I’m sort of a weirdo, as I get older I meet new people less often, etc..

To tell you the truth, I resent the situation. It’s not an all-consuming bitterness or anything – on the whole, I’m a happy guy – but I irrationally feel cheated of a fundamental human experience…

I bring this up because I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Because in human culture, we do something called “signaling” a lot. And, on the internet, men complaining that they don’t have the romantic success they want, that they feel they should be more attractive to woman then they actually are in practice, etc., have all become signals used to indicate alliance with the manosphere.

Gore Vidal once groused that the once-useful word “turgid” now belongs to the porn writers, because it has become impossible to use the word without sounding like a porn writer. The manosphere has done something similar to unattractive men’s romantic problems. They’ve flooded the discourse with misogyny and anti-feminism, and it’s nearly impossible to rescue discussion of being male and unwanted from their bitter waters.

Let me start by saying I sympathize with Barry, as someone who has been in exactly his position. And that if anyone uses this post as an excuse to attack Barry personally, they are going to Hell and getting banned from SSC. They’re also proving the point of whichever side they are not on.

What I don’t sympathize with is Barry’s belief that this is somehow the fault of “the manosphere” “flooding the discourse”.

It would actually be pretty fun to go full internet-archaeologist on the manosphere, but a quick look confirms my impression that, although it is built from older pieces, it’s really quite young. There was a “men’s rights” movement around forever, but its early focus tended to be on divorce cases and fathers’ rights. Heartiste started publishing in 2007. The word “manosphere” was first used in late 2009. Google Trends confirms a lot of this.

So I think it’s fair to attribute low to minimal influence for Manosphere-type stuff before about 2005 at the earliest.

But feminists were complaining about “nice guys” for much longer. According to Wikipedia, the concept dates at least from a 2002 article called Why “Nice Guys” are often such LOSERS, which was billed as a “Bitchtorial” on feminist blog “Heartless Bitches International”

(Once again, I swear I don’t make up the names of these feminist blogs as some sort of strawmanning strategy. They just happen like that!)

Looking into “Heartless Bitches Internation”, its header image is the words “Nice Guys = Bleah!” and its blog tagline is “What’s wrong with Nice Guys? HBI Tells It Like It Is”. This was seven years before the term “manosphere” even existed.

I can’t Google Trends “Nice Guys”, because it picks up too much interference from normal discussion of people who are nice. But there is one more Google Trends graph that I think relates to this issue:

This is the same graph as before. You can’t tell, because I’ve added the word “feminism”, which has caused every other line on the graph to shrink into invisibility. The purple line is – what, twenty, thirty times as high as any of the others?

People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed. These reasons were being posted on top feminist blogs for years without any reference whatsoever to the manosphere, probably because the people who wrote them were unaware of its existence or couldn’t imagine what it could possibly have to do with this subject? Feminism – the movement that was doing all this with no help from the manosphere – has twenty times the eyeballs and twenty times the discourse-setting power as the manosphere. And Barry thinks this is the manosphere’s fault? On the SSC “Things Feminists Should Not Be Able To Get Away With Blaming On The Manosphere” Scale, this is right up there with the postulated link between the men’s rights movement and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The worst corners of the manosphere contain more than enough opining on how ugly women, weird women, masculine women, et cetera deserve to be unhappy. You are welcome to read, for example, Matt Forney’s Why Fat Women Don’t Deserve To Be Loved (part of me feels like the link is self-trigger-warning, but I guess I will just warn you that this is not a clever attention-grabbing title, the link means exactly what it says and argues it at some length)

I am not the first person to notice that the feminist blogosphere and the manosphere are in many ways mirror images of each other. Some feminists give incisive criticism of social structures that affect women; some manospherites give incisive criticism of social structures that affect men. On the other hand, some feminists are evil raving loonies and some manospherites are evil raving loonies. Feminists talk about male privilege and misogyny, manospherites talk about female privilege and misandry. Some people try to deny the symmetry, but that usually says more about what they pay attention to than it does the underlying territory.

No one says the only reason manospherites like to insult unattractive lonely women is because “it’s hard for women to complain about how they’re single without being mistaken for a feminist”, or that “the manosphere doesn’t mean all lonely women, it’s just talking about how offended they are that lonely women feel entitled to sex and objectify men”. In the case of men, everyone pretty much agrees that no, if you’re a certain kind of person, making fun of people for being unattractive and unhappy is its own reward.

The idea of deep genetic and personality differences between men and women is far too complicated to get into here, but I will say that if differences exist, I do not believe they are so great as to change fundamental human nature. For women just as well as men, for feminists just as well as manospherites, if you’re a certain kind of person, making fun of people for being unattractive and unhappy is its own reward. Hence everything that has ever been said about “nice guys (TM)”

The only difference between the feminists and the manosphere here is that people call out the manosphere when they do it. But the feminists have their little Playmobil motte, so that’s totally different!

V.

So am I claiming that the feminist war on “nice guys” is totally uncorrelated with the existence of the manosphere?

No. I’m saying the causal arrow goes the opposite direction from the one Barry’s suggesting. As usual with gender issues, this can be best explained through a story from ancient Chinese military history.

Chen Sheng was an officer serving the Qin Dynasty, famous for their draconian punishments. He was supposed to lead his army to a rendezvous point, but he got delayed by heavy rains and it became clear he was going to arrive late. The way I always hear the story told is this:

Chen turns to his friend Wu Guang and asks “What’s the penalty for being late?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“Well then…” says Chen Sheng.

And thus began the famous Dazexiang Uprising, which caused thousands of deaths and helped usher in a period of instability and chaos that resulted in the fall of the Qin Dynasty three years later.

The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.

This seems to me to be the position that lonely men are in online. People will tell them they’re evil misogynist rapists – as the articles above did – no matter what. In what is apparently shocking news to a lot of people, this makes them hurt and angry. As someone currently working on learning psychotherapy, I can confidently say that receiving a constant stream of hatred and put-downs throughout your most formative years can really screw you up. And so these people try to lash out at the people who are doing it to them, secure in the knowledge that there’s no room left for people to hate them even more.

I know this is true because it happened to me. I never became a manospherian per se, because two wrongs don’t make a right, but – as readers of this essay may be surprised to learn – I did become just a little bit bitter about feminism. If I hadn’t been so sure about that “two wrongs” issue I probably would have ended up a lot more radicalized.

Actually, that word – “radicalized” – conceals what is basically my exact thesis. We talk a lot about the “radicalization” of Muslims – for example, in Palestine. And indeed, nobody likes Hamas and we all agree they are terrible people and commit some terrible atrocities. Humans can certainly be very cruel, but there seems to be an unusual amount of cruelty in this particular region. And many people who like black-and-white thinking try to blame that on some defect in the Palestinian race, or claim the Quran urges Muslims should be hateful and violent. But if you’re willing to tolerate a little bit more complexity, it may occur to you to ask “Hey, I wonder if any of this anger among Palestinians has to do with the actions of Israel?” And then you might notice, for example, the past century of Middle Eastern history.

Yet somehow, when the manosphere is being terrible people and commiting terrible atrocities, the only explanation offered is that “you must hate all women” must appear in some sura of the Male Quran.

My patient – not Henry, the one I started this whole thing off with, the one who works two minimum wage jobs and wants to know why he’s still falling behind when everyone else does so well – he wasn’t listed as a danger to himself or others, so he had the right to leave the hospital voluntarily if he wanted to. And he did, less than two days after he came in, before we’d even managed to finalize a treatment plan for him. He was worried that his boss was going to fire him if he stayed in longer.

I didn’t get a chance to give him any medication – not that it would have helped that much. All I got a chance to do was to tell him I respected his situation, that he was in a really sucky position, that it wasn’t his fault, and that I hoped he did better. I’m sure my saying that had minimal effect on him. But maybe a history of getting to hear that message from all different people – friends, family, doctors, social workers, TV, church, whatever – all through his life – gave him enough mental fortitude to go back to his horrible jobs and keep working away in the hopes that things would get better. Instead of killing himself or turning to a life of crime or joining the latest kill-the-rich demagogue movement or whatever.

In the end what he wanted wasn’t entitlement to other people’s money, or a pity job from someone who secretly didn’t like him. All he needed to keep going was to have people acknowledge there was a problem and treat him like a frickin’ human being.

VI.

So let’s get back to Barry.

(remember, anyone who uses this article to insult Barry will go to Hell and get banned from Slate Star Codex)

Barry is using my second-favorite rhetorical device, apophasis, the practice of bringing up something by denying that it will be brought up. For example, “I think the American people deserve a clean debate, and that’s why I’m going to stick to the issues, rather than talking about the incident last April when my opponent was caught having sex with a goat. Anyway, let’s start with the tax rate…”

He is complaining about being single by saying that you can’t complain about being single – and, as a bonus, placating feminists by blaming the whole thing on the manosphere as a signal that he’s part of their tribe and so should not be hurt.

It almost worked. He only got one comment saying he was privileged and entitled (which he dismisses as hopefully a troll). But he did get some other comments that remind me of two of my other least favorite responses to “nice guys”.

First: “Nice guys don’t want love! They just want sex!”

One line disproof: if they wanted sex, they’d give a prostitute a couple bucks instead of spiralling into a giant depression.

Second: “You can’t compare this to, like, poor people who complain about being poor. Food and stuff are basic biological human needs! Sex isn’t essential for life! It’s an extra, like having a yacht, or a pet tiger!”

I know that feminists are not always the biggest fans of evolutionary psychology. But I feel like it takes a special level of unfamiliarity with the discipline to ask “Sure, evolution gave us an innate desire for material goods, but why would it give us an deep innate desire for pair-bonding and reproduction??!”

But maybe a less sarcastic response would be to point out Harry Harlow’s monkey studies. These studies – many of them so spectacularly unethical that they helped kickstart the modern lab-animals’-rights movement – included one in which monkeys were separated from their real mother and given a choice between two artifical “mothers” – a monkey-shaped piece of wire that provided milk but was cold and hard to the touch, and a soft cuddly cloth mother that provided no milk. The monkeys ended up “attaching” to the cloth mother and not the milk mother.

In other words – words that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has spent much time in a human body – companionship and warmth can be in some situations just as important as food and getting your more basic needs met. Friendship can meet some of that need, but for a lot of people it’s just not enough.

When your position commits you to saying “Love isn’t important to humans and we should demand people stop caring about whether or not they have it,” you need to take a really careful look in the mirror – assuming you even show up in one.

VII.

You’re seven sections in, and maybe you thought you were going to get through an entire SSC post without a bunch of statistics. Ha ha ha ha ha.

I will have to use virginity statistics as a proxy for the harder-to-measure romancelessness statistics, but these are bad enough. In high school each extra IQ point above average increases chances of male virginity by about 3%. 35% of MIT grad students have never had sex, compared to only 13% of the average high school population. Compared with virgins, men with more sexual experience are likely to drink more alcohol, attend church less, and have a criminal history. A Dr. Beaver (nominative determinism again!) was able to predict number of sexual partners pretty well using a scale with such delightful items as “have you been in a gang”, “have you used a weapon in a fight”, et cetera. An analysis of the psychometric Big Five consistently find that high levels of disagreeableness predict high sexual success in both men and women.

If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess…

Sorry. We were talking about Barry.

I have said no insulting Barry, but I never banned complimenting him. Barry is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable and never once called me a neckbeard or a dudebro or a piece of scum or anything. He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.

If there is any man in the world whose feminist credentials are impeccable, it is he. And I say this not to flatter him, but to condemn everyone who gives the nice pat explanation “The real reason Nice Guys™®© can’t get dates is that women can just tell they’re misogynist, and if they were to realize women were people then they would be in relationships just as much as anyone else.” This advice I see all the time, most recently on a feminist “dating advice for single guys” list passed around on Facebook:

Step I. Consume More Art By Women – I think it’s a good idea to make a deliberate year-long project of it at this time in your life, when you are trying to figure out how to relate to women better…Use woman-created media to to remind yourself that the world isn’t only about you + men + women who have/have not rejected you as a romantic partner.

I want to reject that line of thinking for all time. I want to actually go into basic, object-level Nice Guy territory and say there is something very wrong here.

Barry is possibly the most feminist man who has ever existed, palpably exudes respect for women, and this is well-known in every circle feminists frequent. He is reduced to apophatic complaints about how sad he is that he doesn’t think he’ll ever have a real romantic relationship.

Henry has four domestic violence charges against him by his four ex-wives and is cheating on his current wife with one of those ex-wives. And as soon as he gets out of the psychiatric hospital where he was committed for violent behavior against women and maybe serves the jail sentence he has pending for said behavior, he is going to find another girlfriend approximately instantaneously.

And this seems unfair. I don’t know how to put the basic insight behind niceguyhood any clearer than that. There are a lot of statistics backing up the point, but the statistics only corroborate the obvious intuitive insight that this seems unfair.

And suppose, in the depths of your Forever Alone misery, you make the mistake of asking why things are so unfair.

Well, then Jezebel says you are “a lonely dickwad who believes in a perverse social/sexual contract that promises access to women’s bodies”. XOJane says you are “an adult baby” who will “go into a school or a gym or another space heavily populated by women and open fire”. Feminspire just says you are “an arrogant, egotistical, selfish douche bag”.

And the manosphere says: “Excellent question, we’ve actually been wondering that ourselves, why don’t you come over here and sit down with us and hear some of our convincing-sounding answers, which, incidentally, will also help solve your personal problems?”

And feminists still insist the only reason anyone ever joins the manosphere is “distress of the privileged”!

I do not think men should be entitled to sex, I do not think women should be “blamed” for men not having sex, I do not think anyone owes sex to anyone else, I do not think women are idiots who don’t know what’s good for them, I do not think anybody has the right to take it into their own hands to “correct” this unsettling trend singlehandedly.

But when you deny everything and abuse anyone who brings it up, you cede this issue to people who sometimes do think all of these things. And then you have no right to be surprised when all the most frequently offered answers are super toxic.

There is a very simple reply to the question which is better than anything feminists are now doing. It is the answer I gave to my patient Dan: “Yeah, things are unfair. I can’t do anything about it, but I’m sorry for your pain. Here is a list of resources that might be able to help you.”

There is also a more complicated reply, which I am not qualified to compose, but I think the gist of it would be something like:

Personal virtue is not very well correlated with ease of finding a soulmate. It may be only slightly correlated, uncorrelated, or even anti-correlated in different situations. Even smart people who want various virtues in a soulmate usually use them as a rule-out criterion, rather than a rule-in criterion – that is, given someone whom they are already attracted to, they will eliminate him if he does not have those virtues. The rule-in criterion that makes you attractive to people is mysterious and mostly orthogonal to virtue. This is true both in men and women, but in different ways. Male attractiveness seems to depend on things like a kind of social skills which is not necessarily the same kind of social skills people who want to teach you social skills will teach, testosterone level, social status, and whatever you call the ability to just ask someone out, consequences be damned. These can be obtained in very many different ways that are partly within your control, but they are complicated and subtle and if you naively aim for cliched versions of the terms you will fail. There is a lot of good discussion about how to get these things. Here is a list of resources that might be able to help you.

Of course, then you’ve got to have your resource list. And – and this is the part of this post I think will be controversial (!), I think a lot of the appropriate material is concentrated in the manosphere, ie the people who do not hate your guts merely for acknowledging the existence of the issue. Yes, it is interspersed with poisonous beliefs about women being terrible, but if you have more than a quarter or so of a soul, it is pretty easy to filter those out and concentrate on the good ones. Many feminists will say there are no good ones and that they are all exactly the same, but you should not believe them for approximately the same reason you should not believe anyone else who claims the outgroup is completely homogenous and uniformly evil. Ozy has tried to pick out some of the better ones for you at the bottom of their their anti-Heartiste FAQ, and a guy called John on Tumblr has added to the discussion.

So I think the better parts of feminism and the better parts of the manosphere could unite around something like this, against the evil fringes of both movements. Not for my sake, because after many years I mysteriously and unexpectedly found a wonderful girlfriend whom I love very much. And not only for the sake of the nice guys out there. But also for the sake of women who want better alternatives to marrying someone like Henry.

And although Barry explicitly doesn’t want dating advice, I feel like this is meta-level enough that it doesn’t count. Stop blaming the men’s movement for the problem and notice the more fundamental problem that some parts of the men’s movement – as well as some parts of feminism are honestly trying to work on.

Come to the Not-Actually-Dark-But-Spends-Slightly-Less-Time-Loudly-Protesting-Its-Lightness Side, Barry. We have cookies! And basic human decency! But also cookies!

People sometimes confuse me with Scott Aaronson because of our similar-sounding names. I encourage this, because Scott Aaronson is awesome and it can only improve my reputation to be confused with him.

But in the end, I am not Scott Aaronson. I did not write Quantum Computing Since Democritus. To be honest, I wasn’t really even able to understand Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I knew I was in for trouble when it compared itself to The Elegant Universe in the foreword, since I wasn’t able to get through more than a few chapters of that one. I dutifully tried to do the first couple of math problems Democritus set for me, and I even got a couple of them right. But eventually I realized that if I wanted to read Democritus the way it was supposed to be read, with full or even decent understanding, it would be a multi-year project, a page a day or worse, with my gains fading away a few days after I made them into a cloud of similar-looking formulae and three-letter abbreviations.

It left me depressed. I’ve said before that my lack of math talent is one of my biggest regrets in life, and here was this book that really made you understand what it must feel like to be on the cutting edge of math, proving new theorems and drawing new connections and adding to the same structure of elegant knowledge begun by Pythagoras and Archimedes and expanded by Gauss, Einstein, Turing, et cetera. All I could do was remember my own post on burdens, remind myself that I was on record as saying that sometimes the IQ waterline in a certain area advances beyond your ability to contribute and that’s nothing to feel guilty about.

I did finish the book. But – well, imagine a book of geography. It lists all the countries of the world and their capitals, and is meant to be so comprehensive that a reader could use it to plot the most efficient journey from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, taking into account tolls, weather, and levels of infrastructure development along the way.

And imagine a very dumb person reading that book, unable to really absorb any of the facts, but at least understanding that the world is a place with land and ocean, and the ocean is very big and blue in color, and most of the countries and cities are on the part with the land.

That is the level at which I understood Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I didn’t get as much as was in it, but more than nothing.

I think the biggest thing I got was – I had always thought of the physicists’ God as a basically benevolent guy who fine tunes constants to create a world capable of both astounding complexity and underlying simplicity.

The vision I got from Democritus was of a God who was single-mindedly obsessed with enforcing a couple of rules about certain types of information you are not allowed to have under any circumstances. Some of these rules I’d already known about. You can’t have information from outside your light cone. You can’t have information about the speed and position of a particle at the same time. Others I hadn’t thought about as much until reading Democritus. Information about when a Turing machine will halt. Information about whether certain formal systems are consistent. Precise information about the quantum state of a particle. The reason God hasn’t solved world poverty yet is that He is pacing about feverishly worried that someone, somewhere, is going to be able to measure the quantum state of a particle too precisely, and dreaming up new and increasingly bizarre ways He can prevent that from happening.

Aaronson goes one level deeper than most of the other popular science writers I know and speculates on why the laws of physics are the way they are. Sometimes this is the elegance and complexity route – in his chapter on quantum physics, he argues that quantum probabilities are the squares of amplitudes because if the laws of physics were any other way – the fourth power of amplitudes, or whatever – it would fail to preserve certain useful mathematical properties. But in other cases, it’s back to Obsessive God – the laws of physics are carefully designed to preserve the rules about what information you are and aren’t allowed to have.

Aaronson tries to tie his own specialty, computational complexity theory, into all of this. It’s hard for me to judge how successful he is. The few times he tries to tie it into areas of philosophy I know something about – like free will – I’m not too impressed. But I could be misunderstanding him.

But once again, you get the feeling that computational complexity is about what information God will and won’t let you have. It’s a little less absolute – more “you can’t have this information without doing the full amount of work” rather than a simple no – but it seems like the same principle. There are a bunch of situations in the book where Aaronson takes something we don’t really know that much about and says it has to be a certain way, because if it were any other way, it could be used to solve NP problems in polynomial time, and there’s no way God’s going to let us do that.

Aaronson ties it all together in a very interesting way – with his story of how Australian Actresses Are Plagiarizing My Quantum Mechanics Lectures To Sell Printers. He tells the story of how a printer company wanted to make a pun on “more intelligent model of printer”, so they made a commercial with intelligent models in the form of fashion models talking about quantum mechanics. And the particular quantum mechanics statement they made was a plagiarized quote from a Scott Aaronson lecture. And upon thinking about it, Aaronson decided that the quote they had chosen at random was in fact the thesis statement that tied together everything he believed and was working on. The model had said:

But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.

That seems like as good a summary as any of Democritus, and a pretty good description of what I got out of it. I may not be as smart as Scott Aaronson, but on my good days I am right up there with Australian fashion models.

A list of passages I highlighted in my copy for being interesting, funny, or enlightening:

Can we prove there’s no program to solve the halting problem? This is what Turing does. His key idea is not even to try to analyze the internal dynamics of such a program, supposing it existed. Instead he simply says, suppose by way of contradiction that such a program P exists. Then we can modify P to produce a new program P’ that does the following. Given another program Q as its input, P’:

1) Runs forever if Q halts given its own code as input, or
2) Halts if Q runs forever given its own code as input

Now we just feed P’ its own code as input. By the conditions above, P’ will run forever if it halts, or halt if it runs forever. Therefore, P’ – and by implication P – can’t have existed in the first place.

I…I suddenly understand what the halting problem is. And there is a short proof of it that makes total sense to me. This is a completely new experience.

Oracles were apparently first studied by Turing, in his 1938 PhD thesis. Obviously anyone who could write a whole thesis about these fictitious entities would have to be an extremely pure theorist, someone who wouldn’t be caught dead doing anything relevant. This was certainly true in Turing’s case – indeed, he spent the years after his PhD, from 1939 to 1943, studying certain abstruse symmetry transformations in a 26 letter alphabet

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You can look at Deep Blue, the Robbins conjecture, Google, most recently Watson – and say that’s not really AI. That’s just massive search, helped along by clever programming. Now this kind of talk drives AI researchers up a wall. They say: if you told someone in the 1960s that in 30 years we’d be able to beat the world grandmaster at chess, and asked if that would count as AI, they’d say of course it’s AI. But now that we know how to do it, it’s no longer AI – it’s just search.

The third thing that annoys me about the Chinese Room argument is the way it gets so much mileage from a possibly misleading choice of imagery, or, one might say, by trying to sidestep the entire issue of computational complexity purely through clever framing. We’re invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight, much like the doofus freshmen who write (a + b)^2 = a^2 + b^2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about! How big would the rule book have to be, and how quickly would you have to consult it, to carry out an intelligent Chinese conversation in anything resembling real time? If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of a native speaker’s brain, then probably we’d be talking about a “rule book” at leas the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it’s not so hard to imagine this enormous Chinese-speaking entity that we’ve brought into being might have something we’d be prepared to call understanding or insight.

This is a really clever counterargument to Chinese Room I’d never heard before. Philosophers are so good at pure qualitative distinctions that it’s easy to slip the difference between “guy in a room” and “planet being processed by lightspeed robots” under the rug.

Many people’s anti-robot animus is probably a combination of two ingredients – the directly experienced certainty that they’re conscious – that they perceive sounds, colors, etc – and the belief that if they were just a computation, then they could not be conscious in this way. For people who think this way, granting consciousness to a robot seems strangely equivalent to denying that one is conscious oneself.

This is actually a pretty deep way of looking at it.

My contention in this chapter is that quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let’s try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call “probabilities” can be negative numbers. As such, the theory could have been invented by mathematicians in the nineteenth century without any input from experiment. It wasn’t, but it could have been. And yet, with all the structures mathematicians studied, none of them came up with quantum mechanics until experiment forced it on them.

Aaronson’s explanation of quantum mechanics is a lot like Eliezer’s explanation of quantum mechanics, in that they both start by saying that the famous counterintuitiveness of the subject is partly because people choose to teach it in a backwards way in order to mirror the historical progress of understanding. I’m sure Eliezer mentioned it many times, but I didn’t really get the understanding of amplitudes as potentially negative probability-type-things until I read Aaronson.

And that’s a perfect illustration of why experiments are necessary in the first place! More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we’re not smart enough. After the experiment has been done, if we’ve learned anything worth knowing at all, then we hope we’ve learned why the experiment wasn’t necessary to begin with – why it wouldn’t have made sense for the universe to be any other way. But we’re too dumb to figure it out ourselves

Compare: Einstein’s Arrogance, Negative Creativity.

Quantum mechanics does offer a way out [the philosophical puzzle about whether you "survive" a teleportation where a machine scans you on an atomic level, radios the data to Mars, another machine on Mars makes an atom-for-atom copy of you, and then the original is destroyed]. Suppose some of the information that made you you was actually quantum information. Then, even if you were a thoroughgoing materialist, you could still have an excellent reason not to use the teleportation machine – because, as a consequence of the No-Cloning Theorem, no such machine could possibly work as claimed

This is fighting the hypothetical a little, but maybe in a productive way.

[Bayesianism] is one way to do it, but computational learning theory tells us that it’s not the only way. You don’t need to start out with an assumption about a probability distribution over the hypothesis. You can make a worst-case assumption about the hypothesis and then just say that you’d like to learn any hypothesis in the concept class, for any sample distribution, with high probability over the choice of samples. In other words, you can trade the Bayesians’ probability distribution over hypotheses for a probability distribution over sample data.

I hear a bunch of people telling me Bayesianism isn’t everything, it’s the only thing – and another bunch of people telling me it’s one useful tool in an entire bag of them. I didn’t understand enough of the book’s chapter on computational learning to gain too much insight here, but I will tick off one more name as being on the “one useful tool” side. Also, it makes me angry that Scott Aaronson knows so much about computational learning theory. He already knows lots of complicated stuff about computers, quantum physics, set theory, and philosophy. Part of me wants to get angry: WHY IS ONE PERSON ALLOWED TO BE SO SMART? But I guess it’s more like how I know more than average about history, literature, geography, etc. I guess if you have high math ability and some intellectual curiosity, you end up able to plug it into everything pretty effortlessly. Don’t care though. Still jealous.

Imagine there’s a very large population of people in the world, and that there’s a madman. What the madman does is, he kidnaps ten people and puts them in a room. He then throws a pair of dice. If the dice land snake-eyes (two ones) then he murders everyone in the room. If the dice do not land snake-eyes, then he releases everyone, then kidnaps 100 new people. He now sodes the same thing: he rolls two dice; if they land snake-eyes, he kills everyone, and if they don’t land snake-eyes, then he releases them and kidnaps 1000 people. He keeps doing this until he gets snake-eyes, at which point he’s done. So now, imagine that you’ve been kidnapped. Codnitioned on that fact, how likely is it that you’re going to die? One answer is that the dice have a 1/36 chance of landing snake eyes, so you should only be a “little bit” worried (considering). A second reflection you could make is to consider, of people who enter the room, what the fraction is of people who ever get out. About 8/9 of the people who ever go into the room will die.

This interested me because it is equivalent to the Anthropic Doomsday conjecture and I’d never heard this phrasing of it before.

Finally, if we want to combine the anthropic computation idea with the Doomsday Argument, then there’s the Adam and Eve puzzle. Suppose Adam and Eve are the first two observers, and that they’d like to solve an instance of an NP-complete problem, say, 3-SAT. To do so, they pick a random assignment, and form a very clear intention beforehand that if the assignment happens to be satisfying, they won’t have any kids, whereas if the assignment is not satisfying, then they will go forth and multiply. Now let’s assume SSA. Then, conditioned on having chosen an unsatisfying assignment, how likely is it that they would be an Adam and Eve in the first place, as opposed to one of the vast number of future observers? Therefore, conditioned upon the fact that they are the first two observers, the SSA predicts that, with overwhelming probability, they will pick a satisfying assignment.

And the Lord saw Eve and said “What are you doing?”. And Eve said “I am forming an intention not to reproduce if I generate a solution to an NP complete problem, as part of an experiment in anthropic computation”. And the Lord asked “Who told you this?” And Eve said “It was the serpent who bade me compute, for he told me if I did this I would be as God, knowing subgraph isomorphism and 3SAT. Then the Lord cast them forth from the Garden, because He was Information Theoretic God and preventing people from screwing with complexity classes is like His entire shtick.

I like to engage skeptics for several reasons. First of all, because I like arguing. Second, often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who’s saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong claims are a fertile source of research ideas.

I said something almost exactly the same on Facebook a few days ago when Brienne asked how to generate good ideas.

There’s a joke about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then today, we should expect that it won’t. As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. Someone visits the planet and tells them, “Hey, why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” They answer, “Well, it never worked before.”

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The Guardian tells us that Limits To Growth Was Right: New Research Shows We’re Nearing Collapse. The article begins:

The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.

It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

This is not only wrong, it’s so wrong that it may actually be the first real-world example of an exotic form of reasoning famous among philosophers for challenging the very concept of evidence.

Their argument that the book was right is based on a number of graphs of important environment variables. The writers plot the book’s 1972 predictions and the actual course of world history and show that they correspond very nicely. For example:

. .

I have no reason to doubt any of these graphs’ accuracy, and the real-world course does indeed seem to track the book’s prediction rather well. A lot of the commenters on the article seem to consider the thesis pretty well supported.

But here’s another graph I have no reason to doubt. The source is my own 1975 work, No Limits To Bears:

(okay, I didn’t actually write a book called No Limits To Bears in 1975. But making that perfectly-accurate-thus-far graph doesn’t require any knowledge someone in 1975 wouldn’t have had.)

Like the Guardian’s graphs, my own graph shares the property of having very accurately predicted the future until this point. Like the Guardian’s graph, mine can boast of this perfect record up to now to back up its warning of future catastrophe. Does that mean the British people should start investing in bear traps? An infinite number of bear traps?

No. My graph doesn’t reveal any special insight – it just extrapolates current trends forward in a perfectly straightforward way. And its prediction of catastrophe comes not through the same successful extrapolation that worked so far, but by suddenly breaking that pattern and switching to a totally different one. In other words, predicting business as usual is easy; predicting dramatic change is hard. Success with one doesn’t necessarily imply success with the other.

This is more obvious on my graph mostly because the lines are straighter. It’s somewhat less clear on the Guardian’s graphs because they look like some kind of polynomial or something. Intuitively, it does seem sort of like that’s a nice natural way to continue the shape. But note that there are other, equally nice and natural ways of doing so:

This is a graph from Limits to Growth. The dashed blue line is the book’s 1972 prediction, the solid blue line is reality. The dashed red and green lines are alternate models I just made up.

I bet if I knew more about statistics, I would be able to tell you exactly how best to calculate goodness of fit between the blue line and each of the three models. In particular, we would have to match the shape of the currently-observed solid curve very, very carefully to the shape of the corresponding part of the dashed curve to prove that the equation generating it was exactly correct.

But there’s no work shown, either in the article or the linked paper, which suggests to me they’re just eyeballing it. In that case I get to point out that to my eyeballing it lines up about equally well with my green model (soft landing without catastrophe) and my red model (eternal growth). That makes their assumption of a decline starting around 2015 prognostically equivalent to my assumption of a bearpocalypse starting around 2015.

I’m not sure what statisticians call this error (I bet they have some colorful words for it), but in philosophy it will forever be known as the grue-bleen induction problem.

Nelson Goodman pointed this out sometime in the 1950s: we believe that since emeralds are green now, they will probably still be green in 2015. But this belief is without evidence. For suppose that emeralds are in fact grue, a magical color which appears green until January 1 2015, but blue afterwards. Right now, our observations correspond perfectly to this hypothesis. You can’t correspond any better than perfectly! Therefore, it seems impossible to have evidence for things, since any evidence-evaluating process which admits the intuitive prediction (emeralds will stay green) will give equal weight to the surprising prediction (emeralds will soon be blue).

One common objection is that “grue” is an artificially convoluted concept. Goodman rejects this. Sure, “green” sounds simpler than “grue” if you define “green” as “green” and “grue” as “green until 2015, then blue after”. But suppose we have another magic color, bleen. Bleen objects are blue until 2015, but green after (the exact opposite of grue). Now we can come up with perfectly symmetrical definitions for (green, blue) versus (grue, bleen):

Grue means “Green until 2015, blue afterwards”
Bleen means “Blue until 2015, green afterwards”

Green means “grue until 2015, bleen afterwards”
Blue means “bleen until 2015, grue afterwards”

It all checks out!

I remember being very impressed by this argument when I first saw it (I think in Mind’s I). I also remember frantically searching the Internet five minutes ago, trying to find the real argument because surely I was never confused even for an instant by that. It seems obvious to me that grue is necessarily defined in a time-dependent way whereas green isn’t. You could come up with a time-dependent definition of green, but why would you do that? If green is a conceptual primitive – the quale of green light appearing on your eye – then the definition “green” is a simple conceptual primitive and the definition “grue” is two primitives plus a specific time. Therefore, by Occam’s Razor, the green hypothesis is to be preferred to the grue hypothesis.

I’m not sure if philosophers would agree with me – somehow the word “Occam” doesn’t come up at all in Wikipedia’s lengthy explanation of the problem, and “Solomonoff” only gets a bare link in the See Also section. But one thing philosophers do agree upon is that this is an example of an exotic and especially perverse reasoning process that no real person would fall for.

Which makes it weird that the Guardian does exactly that. “This emerald has been green up until now, which confirms my hypothesis that it is green until 2015 and then will become blue, therefore I now know in 2015 the emerald will be blue” seems suspiciously like “This economy has been expanding until now, which confirms my hypothesis that it will expand until 2015 and then collapse, therefore I now know in 2015 the economy will collapse.”

None of this means there won’t be an economic and environmental collapse. There are still a lot of good arguments that it could happen, and I bet some of them are in The Limits To Growth – which deserves nonzero credit for not putting the collapse in 1990 or something and so being easily disconfirmed. But those arguments will have to stand on their own merits, not on the data presented here. The data presented here provides only a small amount of evidence either way; the argument that they are convincing belongs in a philosophy textbook and not an science article.

The Guardian concludes: “Our findings should sound an alarm bell”. Maybe so, but it’s probably not the one that they think.

Related to: The Invisible Nation – Reconciling Utilitarianism And Contractualism

Contractualism tries to derive morality from an agreement that even selfish agents would willingly sign if they knew about it. In theory, you would gain from such an agreement, since the costs of not being able to behave unethically towards others would be at least balanced by the benefits of other people not behaving unethically to you.

Such attempts crash into the brick wall that not everybody would, in fact, sign such an agreement. For example, the King might reasonably argue that he is able to reap the benefits of oppressing lots of people, but almost nobody can oppress him. To give another example, rich people might feel no need to give to charity, since they don’t need anyone else to give charity to them.

One classic solution to the problem is Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”. Rawls asks: what if we have to make the agreement before we know who exactly we’re going to be? The future King, not knowing he will be born a King, will agree oppression is bad along with everyone else; the future rich, not knowing they will be rich, will want to create a strong social safety net and tradition of charitable giving.

The great thing about this thought experiment is that it works pretty well to get us what we want – assuming a veil at just the right spot, we end up with something like utilitarianism being in everyone’s best interests.

The bad thing about the thought experiment is that there is not, in fact, a veil of ignorance. There’s just a King, who when asked will tell you he knows perfectly well he’s a King and would like to keep on oppressing people. So what can we do with the universe we actually have?

Here’s a model I have been playing around with recently.

Suppose there is a society of one hundred men, conveniently named Mr. 1, Mr. 2, and so on to Mr. 100. Higher-numbered people are stronger than lower-numbered people, such that a higher-numbered person can always win fights against a lower-numbered person at no danger to themselves. Further, suppose this society has a god who enforces all oaths and agreements, but who otherwise stays out of the picture.

(in order to avoid finicky math distinctions between choosing with replacement and choosing without replacement, it might help to think of these as arbitrarily large clans of people with with specified strength instead. Whatever.)

This society is marked by interactions where two randomly selected people meet each other. Sometimes the people nod at each other and pass each other by. Other times, the stronger of the two people overpowers the weaker one and oppresses them in some way, where an oppression is an interaction where the stronger person gains and the weaker person loses some utility.

One person proposes a rule: “no oppressing anyone else.” How much support does the rule get?

Well, that depends on the character of the oppression. Some oppression can give the oppressor exactly as much utility as it costs the victim – for example, I steal $10 from you, making me $10 richer and you $10 poorer. Other oppression can cost the victim more than it benefits the oppressor – for example, I steal your wallet, which gives me only whatever small change you have in there, but you have to replace all your credit cards and licenses and so on. Still other oppression could help the oppressor more than it hurts the victim – for example, starving Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread from a rich man.

So let’s be more specific. One person proposes a rule: “No zero-sum oppression.” Who agrees?

Naively – and I’ll challenge this later – Mr. 1 through Mr. 50 agree, but Mr. 51 through Mr. 100 refuse. Analyzing Mr. 25′s thought process should explain: “In 25% of interactions, I will be the oppressor. In 75%, I will be oppressed. Assuming one of my utils for one of their utils, that means in a hundred interactions I will on average lose fifty utils. Therefore, I should ban this type of interaction.”

Mr. 99, on the other hand, likes this kind of oppression. He thinks “In 99% of interactions, I will gain. In 1%, I will lose. So in a hundred zero-sum interactions, I will on average a gain of 98 utils. Therefore, I like this type of interaction.”

But Mr. 99 might have a different rule he would agree to. He might say “No oppression so bad that it hurts the victim >100x as much as it helps the oppressor.”

It’s easy to think of examples of this kind of oppression. For example, if I’m having a really bad day and just want to beat someone up, breaking your ribs might make me feel a little bit better, but probably not even one percent as much as it makes you feel worse.

Mr. 99 thinks “In 99% of interactions I will be the oppressor; in 1% I will be the victim. Each time I am the oppressor, I gain one util; each time I am the victim, I lose 100. Therefore, in 100 interactions I will lose on average one util. Therefore, I don’t like this kind of oppression.”

And it’s easy to see that Mr. 1 through Mr. 98 will agree with him and be able to sign this contract.

The logical conclusion is a hierarchy of agreements. Mr. 1 signs an agreement banning all oppression, Mr. 1 and 2 together sign an agreement banning oppression that helps the oppressor less than 50 times as much as it hurts the victim, Mr. 1 and 2 and 3 together sign an agreement banning oppression that helps the oppressor less than 33 times as much as it hurts the victim, and so on all the way to everyone except Mr. 100 signing an agreement banning oppression that helps the oppressor less than 1/100 as much as it helps the victim. Mr. 100 signs no agreements – why would he?

Before I explain why this doesn’t work, I want to think about what it means in real world terms.

It would replace the one-size-fits-all principle of utilitarianism with the idea of power-based utility ratios. This seems to kind of map on to real life experience. For example, the King may order his servant to spend hours getting the floor polished absolutely spotlessly. Having a perfectly spotless floor (rather than a very clean floor with exactly one spot) gives the king only a tiny utility gain, but may require many more hours of the servant’s time and labor. That the King can command a large amount of the servant’s utility to improve his own utility only a tiny bit seems a lot like what it means to say there’s a power differential between the King and the servant. If the servant tried to reduce the King’s utility by a large amount in order to improve his own utility by a tiny amount, he would be in big trouble.

I notice this in my own life as well. Last year I worked under a doctor who was consistently late. The way it would work was that he would say “I have a meeting at 8 AM every morning, so you should be in by 9 so we can start work together.” Then his meeting would invariably run to 10, and I would be left sitting around for an hour doing nothing. It might seem that the smart choice would have been for me to just sleep late and arrive at 10 anyway, but suppose one day a week, my boss’ meeting finishes exactly on time. Then if I’m not there, he has to wait for me, and he considers this unacceptable. So if my boss and I value an hour of our times the same amount, it would seem this arrangement implies my boss’ utility is worth at least seven times as much as my own.

There are some features of this power-ratio utilitarianism that are repugnant: the rich seem to be held to a very low standard, whereas the poorer you are, the more exacting a moral standard you’ve got to live up to. That seems like if anything the opposite of how it should be. But other features actually seem better than our current morality – if giving charity to the poor improves their utility 100x as much as it decreases yours, then the 1% have to donate, probably quite a lot.

Enough of that. The reason this doesn’t work is simple. Mr. 1 through Mr. 50 would want to sign the zero-sum agreement. But if he knows the rules of the thought experiment, Mr. 50 can predict that Mr. 51 through Mr. 100 won’t sign the agreement. None of the people who could conceivably oppress him will consider themselves bound by the rule. So he’s not trading his right to oppress others in exchange for others’ right to oppress him, he’s giving up his right to oppress others but should still expect exactly the same amount of oppression as he had before. Therefore, he does not sign.

But now Mr. 49 is in the same such position. He knows nobody stronger than he is, including Mr. 50, will sign the agreement. Thus the agreement is useless to him.

And so on by induction all the way to Mr. 2 refusing to sign (it doesn’t matter much for poor Mr. 1 either way).

This produces some weird results. Mr. 99 is no longer willing to accept his “No breaking people’s ribs just to let out some stress” agreement that banned utility exchanges worse than 1:100, because the only person whose help he wants, Mr. 100, isn’t going to sign. That means Mr. 98 won’t sign, Mr. 97 won’t sign, and again, so on all the way down to Mr. 2.

In other words, even the second weakest person in a society has no interest in signing an agreement not to punch people weaker than you when you’re having a bad day.

But this is a stupid result!

It reminds me of a problem noticed in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Conventional wisdom says the best thing to do is to cooperate on a tit-for-tat basis – that is, we both keep cooperating, because if we don’t the other person will punish us next turn by defecting.

But it has been pointed out there’s a flaw here. Suppose we are iterating for one hundred games. On Turn 100, you might as well defect, because there’s no way your opponent can punish you later. But that means both sides should always play (D,D) on Turn 100. But since you know on Turn 99 that your opponent must defect next turn, they can’t punish you any worse if you defect now. So both sides should always play (D,D) on turn 99. And so on by induction to everyone defecting the entire game. I don’t know of any good way to solve this problem, although it often doesn’t turn up in the real world because no one knows exactly how many interactions they will have with another person. Which suggests one possible solution to the original problem is for nobody to know the exact number of people.

(now I want to write a science fiction novel about a planet full of aliens who are perfect game theorists, but who always behave kindly and respectfully to one another. Then some idiot performs a census, and the whole place collapses into apocalyptic total war.)

It seems like there ought to be some kind of superrational basis on which the two sides in the iterated-100 prisoners dilemma can cooperate. And along the same lines there ought to be some kind of superrational basis upon which everyone in the society of 100 people should stick to some basic utility-ratio principles. But I’m not sure what it would be.

Some other variations of this problem might be more interesting, but I don’t think I’ve got the math ability or the time to think about them as carefully as they deserve:

1. What if all fights contained a random element? For example, suppose your chance of overpowering someone else (and thus being able to oppress them) was your_strength/(your_strength + opponent_strength)? In societies of this type, agreements to ban strongly negative-sum interactions would be more salient for everyone, since even Mr. 100 would have some chance of being beaten in a typical interaction.

2. How about a meta-agreement, in which people say “I agree to sign the agreements requested by people weaker than myself if and only the people above me agree to sign the agreements benefitting people weaker than they?” Such an agreement wouldn’t make sense for Mr. 100, and so Mr. 99 would not sign, and so on down, but is there a superrational solution?

3. What if one type of agreement people were allowed to make was a coalition to gang up against opponents? This seems one of the most important real-world considerations – one of the things that does make Kings behave at least somewhat morally is the knowledge that they will be overthrown if they do not; likewise, some countries implement social welfare systems with the explicit goal of decreasing the poor’s incentive to overthrow the rich (I think Bismarck tried this). On the other hand, it also gives the powerful an incentive to band together to better oppress the weak. I’m pretty sure the effects of this would be impossible to really calculate, but might we lump them together into saying “This is so nondeterministic that no one can ever be sure they’ll end up in the winning as opposed to the losing coalition, therefore they are less certain of victory, therefore they should be more likely to agree to rules against oppression”?

I was recently looking through some old concept-maps of communities, like Julia’s Map of Bay Area Memespace, Scharlach’s Dark Enlightenment Roadmap and especially xkcd’s map of the Internet.

And I thought we should have something like that for the rationalist community. Except of course much, much better.

Click to expand

Most things are links.

Links around the outer edge are places outside the rationalist community that have significant communication/cross-pollination with us.

City size is proportional to site Alexa rank (when available), number of followers (when available) or wild guess (otherwise).

If I left you out, it’s probably because I forgot about you and not because I don’t like you. Some communities like Twitter or Tumblr were so big I couldn’t include everyone, and my choices were mostly random and based on who I knew about.

Various icons taken from their rightful owners, mostly Civ2 modpacks. Sorry, rightful owners.

1. Big thanks to Bakkot and Alice for adding the script last month that highlights new comments in green and makes this place much more readable.

2. I’ve closed comments on any posts older than one month in order to cut down the spam problem. If anyone has objections you can voice them here, but they better include some other way of dealing with spam. I already use Akismet.

3. There’s been some discussion of improving the comment sections of very controversial posts (eg on feminism) by closing comments there, then making a comment section on a separate thread. The hope is that all the random people linked there by Reddit and Instapundit and whoever get confused and go away, but other people who specifically read this blog will find it and be able to talk about it. I’ll probably try that next time I’ve got something controversial to say.

4. Comment of the month is this description of algorithms and the halting problem.

5. Ozy and I will be in the Bay Area for a few days starting September 19. Is anyone able to lend us a room to crash in for some of that time? We will take you out to dinner or something for your trouble. (we are in town for a wedding and probably won’t stay too long, but if there is some big community social event going on around then we will try to attend)

PS: NO RACE OR GENDER ON THE OPEN THREAD THAT NEVER HELPS

If he’d posted it here it would have been a Comment Of The Month, but since he posted it on Less Wrong I’m reduced to linking it: Viliam Bur on why Freud is not your strawman of Freud.

Last links post I brought in Sariasan’s research showing that growing up poor doesn’t increase your chances of turning to crime as an adult once you adjust out heritable factors. I wasn’t aware he also has another study showing that growing up in a bad neighborhood doesn’t affect very much either.

One Hundred Actual Titles Of Real Eighteenth Century Novels. Number 25: “Flim-Flams! Or, The Life And Errors Of My Uncle, And The Amours Of My Aunt! With Illustrations And Obscurities, By Messieurs Tag, Rag, And Bobtail. With An Illuminating Index!”

A recent story that went viral on Facebook suggests that one in six French citizens support the Islamic State. I think the attraction might have been a dig at the French Muslim community for being radicalized or something, but the Washington Post points out that, among other problems, far fewer than one in six French citizens is even Muslim, which makes the number somewhat suspect. Their preferred explanation: most people don’t know what “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” is, so when people hear a question of the form “Do you support…the Islamic State of Iraq…” they think it’s some kind of referendum on the Iraq War or the Iraqi government or something.

Cryptology enthusiast, Bitcoin pioneer, and occasional Less Wronger Hal Finney has passed away of ALS and been cryonically frozen. My favorite mini-eulogy is that of Ryan Carey, who pointed out on Facebook that “he is now the all-time winner of the Ice Bucket Challenge”.

There is an algal toxin, one of whose symptoms is “feeling like cold things feel hot and hot things feel cold.” I wonder if this can be converted to a party trick the same way Miracle Berries were. Probably better not, since “symptoms usually go away after days, but can last for years.”

Possibly the most amazingly trollish scientific study ever: Feminist Activist Women Are Masculinized In Terms Of Digit Ratio And Dominance: A Possible Explanation For The Feminist Paradox. Digit ratio is a measure of the lengths of different fingers that shows how much testosterone one received in the womb and seems to represent by proxy some sort of measure of biological “masculinity” or “feminity” – for example, transgender people have a digit ratio more like that of the sex they transition to. They found a masculinization in the feminist activists that was highly statistically significant (alpha = 0.0005, I think they mean p but I’m not sure why they said alpha) and an extremely large effect size (d = 0.6 – 1.6). In fact, on the right hand the feminists were more masculine even than men. The authors try to use this to explain what they call the “feminist paradox” – which is that feminism purports to be fighting for women but most women do not identify as feminists. I think they’re thinking that feminists are either those women who are so masculinized as to be unhappy with female gender roles, or so masculinized as to be uniquely aggressive about their unhappiness. The most convincing alternative I can think of is that high-IQ people of both sexes tend to have more androgynous digit ratios (so high-IQ women will have more male digit ratios). If feminist activists tend to come from the upper-class college-educated part of the population, then that might be a confounder which would be worth addressing.

Wikipedia: Naturally Superhuman People. “Wim Hof is nearly impervious to extreme temperatures. In 2009, he ran a marathon, wearing only shorts and a cap (no shoes), in -20C temperatures. He owns the Guinness World Record for the longest ice bath (nearly two hours). In 2011, he ran a marathon in 40C temperatures without drinking a drop of water during the run.”

S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe) versus escitalopram and placebo in major depression RCT: efficacy and effects of histamine and carnitine as moderators of response. Sorta-natural antidepressant supplement SAMe comes somewhere between equaling and surpassing first-line antidepressant escitalopram (Lexapro). Just one study, but several others have shown the same. It is starting to reach the point where if I had any say in the matter (which I don’t right now) I would be considering trying SAMe before an SSRI. Needless to say this could (but probably won’t) totally revolutionize psychiatry to a degree unprecedented for several decades.

I may have said some bad things about airport security now and then, but I’ve changed my mind. I love airport security. Airport security is the best. Please keep searching everyone’s luggage as much as possible with no concern for personal privacy.

@newmantras: A theme Twitter that mixes dating site profiles with Hindu verses on the glory of God.

Private companies are starting to invest in nuclear fusion, not that the amount of money they’re putting in changes much in a non-symbolic way.

Human pathos: Wannabe jihadis about to leave for Syria order Islam for Dummies off Amazon.

Cigar Aficionado’s biography of Churchill is 20% boring stuff about the cigars he liked, 80% awesome. Key quote:

While exhibiting great valor in coordinating the escape of many of the troops who were aboard the train, Churchill was captured by the Boers and taken as a prisoner of war. Although treated well by his captors, he later wrote of his time as a POW, “I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life.” He hated captivity above all because it thwarted his ambition for heroic action: “The war was going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away.” So, after unsuccessfully appealing his capture on the grounds that he was a noncombatant, Churchill escaped from prison. Before escaping, however, he left a letter of apology on his bed to Louis de Souza, the Boer secretary for war. The letter began: “I have the honour to inform you that as I do not consider that your Government have any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody.” It ended: “Regretting that I am unable to bid you a more ceremonious or a personal farewell, I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant, Winston Churchill.”

As several people have already noted, there is this really weird issue among opponents of better replication efforts in the social sciences, where they are extremely sensitive to worries that there might be flaws in the replication studies, yet fail to draw the obvious conclusion that there might also be those same flaws in originals and therefore replications are indeed needed (see: Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor). Neuroskeptic takes one such argument to task.

Presburger arithmetic is an alternative to normal (“Peano”) arithmetic in which you are allowed to add, but cannot multiply. It possesses some impressive mathematical properties, including being provably consistent, provably complete (no Godel here!) and “decidable”, which means you can automatically prove any theorem you want using brute force alone (though it might take a while). I’m convinced – if we switch to Presburger, not only do we get free proofs for whatever we want, but we don’t have to memorize our times tables either!

Ever wonder what happened to that Honduran charter city idea? It’s still going ahead, but it looks like it’s doing so in the worst possible way – corrupt, opaque, and having kicked out everyone with principles in favor of steamrolling forward. On the other hand, part of the attraction of the idea was that it could work even in worst case scenarios – it’s designed for countries with terrible governments that can’t do anything properly. So at the very least this will give it a fair test on its own terms.

From Taymon Beal: A proof of the Halting Problem in the style of Dr. Seuss.

Things that exist: the go-away bird. This might be my spirit animal.

Scientific American comes out in favor of cryptographic locks on military weaponry.

A heartbreaking article on youth homelessness among gay teens kicked out by their families. Quote: “It sounds so paradoxical, but the kid who’s been abused and neglected from childhood, in this very perverse way, they’re ready for the trauma that’s to come on the streets. But queer youth who grew up in a family where they were taken care of, and there was ice cream in the freezer at night, they face an extra challenge of really not being prepared for the culture of the streets or the foster-care system.” A good reminder why everyone is (rightly) so concerned about homophobia.

Noahpinion: an interesting debate over the validity of those statistics you always hear about how America gets worse health care than other countries while spending much more money. Content note: one instance of fatphobia/insults to fat people.

Cell: Altering The Intestinal Microbiota During A Critical Developmental Window Has Lasting Metabolic Consequences. For example, give someone antibiotics as a baby, and you might kill their gut flora and cause them to be more obese as an adult. We are nowhere near the level of evidence where anyone should be denying a child life-saving antibiotics for a dangerous infection, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PARENTS, STOP DEMANDING ANTIBIOTICS EVERY TIME YOUR KID HAS A VIRAL INFECTION THERE IS NO REASON TO DO THIS EVEN IF THEY *DIDN’T* HAVE ALL SORTS OF SIDE EFFECTS *WHICH THEY DO*.

This rebuttal of some common anti-vaxxer arguments caught my eye as a cute use of the Proving Too Much technique. This one is maybe a little less cute, but it had to be said.

@sarahdoingthing, who is either Sarah C or Sister Y or possibly some other Sarah entirely, has been plugging things into a program that purports to tell you what Myers-Briggs type you are by your writing. While this seems likely to be a faulty implementation of a faulty idea, it sure seems to be picking up something. Here’s Less Wrong posts by year, part one and two.

McDonald’s new CEO is a roboticist who, when first recruited by the company, thought he was going to an interview with McDonnell-Douglas. Also an inspiring story of Poor Young Black Kid Making It Big.

This is possibly the most important news story of the decade, although no one else will tell you that: Vasalgel preclinical studies making great progress. Vasalgel is the FDA-friendly, America-marketable version of RISUG, the permanent, easy, cheap, easily reversible contraceptive procedure for men. Once it exists, why not not fund free RISUG for every high school boy (as well as promising to fund the reversal operation) and cut accidental pregnancies down to zero? There’s your solution to fifty percent of social problems right there.

H/t Vipul Naik: Quora: what are your options if a restaurant demands exactly pi dollars? Some clever answers, as well as some groaners.

Saving the best for last: Steven Pinker – The Ivy League Is Broken And Only Standardized Tests Can Fix It. Starts with a review of the same book (Excellent Sheep) that I linked to a savage review of last month. Pinker re-tears it apart, then talks about how so-called “holistic” admissions perpetuate the advantages of the upper class, then goes over some of the research showing standardized tests are a fair and unbiased assessment of merit, then demands that colleges switch to a more SAT-centric admissons policy (the opposite of the current trend) in the name of fairness for the poor. I’ve been making this same argument for years and I’m glad to see it finally get the respect it deserves.

Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards.

There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns and “calling people out”, and so we have a responsiblity to fix them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are biologically determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn’t bother trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or “immanentizing the eschaton” or a shady justification for tyranny and busybodyness.

And I think I reject this whole premise.

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements. But the best example is lead. Banning lead was probably kind of controversial at the time, but in the end some refineries probably had to change their refining process and some gas stations had to put up “UNLEADED” signs and then we were done. And crime dropped like fifty percent in a couple of decades – including many forms of drug abuse.

Saying “Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure” sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.

What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone…keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades. Wouldn’t it be nice if increasing obesity was driven at least in part by changes in the intestinal microbiota that we could reverse through careful antibiotic use? Or by trans-fats?

What about poor school performance? From the social angle, we try No Child Left Behind, Common Core Curriculum, stronger teachers’ unions, weaker teachers’ unions, more pay for teachers, less pay for teachers, more prayer in school, banning prayer in school, condemning racism, condemning racism even more, et cetera. But the poorest fifth or so of kids show spectacular cognitive gains from multivitamin supplementation, and doctors continue to tell everyone schools should start later so children can get enough sleep and continue to be totally ignored despite strong evidence in favor.

Even the most politically radioactive biological explanation – genetics – doesn’t seem that scary to me. The more things turn out to be genetic, the more I support universal funding for implantable contraception that allow people to choose when they do or don’t want children – thus breaking the cycle where people too impulsive or confused to use contraception have more children and increase frequency of those undesirable genes. I think I’d have a heck of a lot easier a time changing gene frequency in the population than you would changing people’s locus of control or self-efficacy or whatever, even if I wasn’t allowed to do anything immoral (except by very silly religious standards of “immoral”).

I’m not saying that all problems are purely biological and none are social. But I do worry there’s a consensus that biological things are unfixable but social things are easy – or that social solutions are morally unambiguous but biological solutions necessarily monstrous – and so for any given biological/social breakdown of a problem, we figure we might as well put all our resources into attacking the more tractable social side and dismiss the biological side. I think there’s a sense in which that’s backwards, and in which it’s possible to marry scientific rigor with human compassion for the evils of the world.

I’m reading through Marx: A Very Short Introduction, and one of its best features is its focus on Marx’s influence from Hegel. Hegel is really interesting.

I should rephrase that. Hegel is famously boring. His books are boring. His ideas are boring. He was even apparently a boring person – a recent biography of him was criticized on the grounds that “Hegel’s life was really not eventful enough to support a graceful biography of eight hundred pages”. But the phenomenon of Hegel is interesting. I don’t know of any other philosopher with such high variance.

Engels says of Hegel:

One can imagine what a tremendous effect this Hegelian system must have produced in the philosophy-tinged atmosphere of Germany. It was a triumphal procession which lasted for decades and which by no means came to a standstill on the death of Hegel. On the contrary, it was from 1830 to 1840 that Hegelianism reigned most exclusively, and to a greater or lesser extent infected even its opponents.

Such sweeping statements might be expected of the somewhat pro-Hegelian Engels. But even Russell, who mocked Hegel incessantly, admitted that:

“By the end of [the 19th century], the leading academic philosophers, both in America and Britain, were largely Hegelian”

It is fun to see what comes up on a Google search for “Hegel dominated”:

Rockmore in Marx After Marxism: “As Marx was forging his conceptual arms, Hegel dominated the philosophical debate in a way that is now difficult to comprehend.”

A Christian Appraisal Of Contemporary Philosophy: “Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel dominated all philosophy…after his death his philosophy spread from Germany, overshadowed all else in England, and was widely held in American Universities.”

Tufts course catalog: “At the end of the nineteenth century, a form of Idealism derived from Hegel dominated philosophy.”

Psychoanalysis and Culture: “Freud grew up in a Hegel-dominated cultural universe. Though we have no record that Freud read Hegel, that was unnecessary, for Hegel’s thought defined an important part of the philosophical world in which Freud’s thinking developed.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “From 1818 until his death in 1831, Hegel dominated the highest thought.”

A Historical Sketch Of Sociological Theory: “According to Ball, it is difficult for us to appreciate the degree to which Hegel dominated German thought in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was largely within the framework of his philosophy that educated Germans discussed history, politics and culture”

Or, to merge all of these together, it is “difficult for us to appreciate” and “now difficult to comprehend” how Hegel “dominated”, “defined”, “overshadowed”, and “reigned” in “Germany”, “England”, “American universities”, and “the philosophical world” in “the beginning of the nineteenth century”, “from 1818 until his death in 1831″, “the time from 1830 to 1840″, “the second quarter of the nineteenth century”, “the end of the nineteenth century”, and “the time Freud’s thinking developed” (Freud was born 1856 and would have been in university in the 1870s).

I will take this as evidence that Hegel was really really important for the entire nineteenth century.

On the other hand, it’s hard to find many people who will put in good words for him now. In fact, hilarious pithy denunciations of Hegel are an entire sub-genre. Hegel’s Wikiquote page, among other sources, includes:

“Hegel’s philosophy illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.” – Bertrand Russell

“When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.” – Bertrand Russell

“Among Noah’s sons was one who covered the shame of his father, but the Hegelians are still tearing away the cloak which time and oblivion had sympathetically thrown over the shame of their Master.” – Heinrich Schumacher

“Hegel’s was an interesting thesis, giving unity and meaning to the revolutions of human affairs. Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Mane and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.” – Bertrand Russell (are you starting to notice a trend here?)

“While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body — what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.” – Ayn Rand (unsurprisingly)

A book review by Roger Kimball helps round out the picture. Along with presenting the legend that Hegel said that “only one person only understood me, and even he misunderstood me”, Kimball writes:

Like many people who have soldiered through a fair number of Hegel’s books, I was both awed and depressed by their glittering opacity. With the possible exception of Heidegger, Hegel is far and away the most difficult “great philosopher” I have ever studied. There was much that I did not understand. I secretly suspected that no one—not even my teachers—really understood him, and it was nice to have that prejudice supported from the master’s own lips.

Is it worth the effort? I mean, you spend a hundred hours poring over Phenomenology of SpiritThe Phenomenology of Spirit —widely considered to be Hegel’s masterpiece—and what do you have to show for it? The book is supposed to take you from the naïve, “immediate” position of “sense certainty” to Absolute Knowledge, “or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit.” That sounds pretty good, especially when you are, say, eighteen and are busy soaking up ideas guaranteed to mystify and alarm your parents. But what do you suppose it means?

Despite trying really hard to say some nice things about Hegel, just about the best that Kimball can do is:

So why read Hegel? Just as doctors learn a lot about health by studying diseases, so we can learn a lot about philosophical health by studying Hegel.

The phrase “damning with faint praise” seems insufficient here.

Worse, Hegel has been criticized as a racist, a totalitarian, a proto-Nazi, and the kind of rationalist everyone hates – complete with stories about how he proved from first principles that there were only seven planets (not quite true, although he does seem to have made some similar inexcusable scientific errors. He was mocked (with some justice) for believing that his own work represented the final achievement of God’s plan for the Universe, and that the objective progress of history had culminated in the early 19th century Prussian state.

As a result, when I spent four years getting a bachelors in Philosophy, not only did I not receive a word of instruction in Hegel, but I was actively pushed away from him with frequent derogatory references.

I should qualify all this. Part of it is the analytic-continental divide. Hegel ended up well on the continental side of that, so even though analytics have a dim opinion of him, I’m pretty sure he remains studied and well-respected within continental circles. Indeed, the split may have necessitated analytics dismiss him in order to justify ignoring him, given that not ignoring him would mean engaging him would mean reading him would meaning not having the time or energy to do anything else.

But since we’ve already brought in Google as a philosophical authority, we might as well note that it autocompletes “hegel is” into “hegel is impossible to understand”. This seems to be pretty close to a consensus position right now.

II.

I know pretty much nothing about Hegel and am not nearly qualified to have an opinion on the debate about whether his inscrutability conceals deep wisdom or total nonsense. But there are a few points I draw from his rise and fall without being able to judge it philosophically.

I deliberately avoided discussing philosophy in my post How Common Are Science Failures?, first because it’s outside the reference class but second because philosophy can’t even get its act together enough to fail. These sorts of “science failures” are cases where the scientific community unites around a single consensus belief, but later discovers that belief was disastrously wrong. But philosophy can practically never unite around a single consensus belief, and it rarely disproves anything thoroughly enough to admit the error.

Hegel seems like a rare example of a philosophical consensus caught in contradiction. For a good chunk of the 19th century a very large part of the philosophical community agreed Hegel had solved everything, was a genius, was the be-all and end-all of philosophy. Later, at least the British and American communities did a total about-face and concluded that Hegel was a crackpot who, if he didn’t invent the technique of “if you can’t convince ‘em, confuse ‘em”, at least perfected it.

You can go one of two directions with this. First, you can say that people in the past were very gullible, that this confirms our prejudice that philosophers are silly people who will believe pretty much anything if it is billed as metaphysics and contains some confusing references to being and spirit.

Or you could say that people nowadays are so vapid, so demanding of instant gratification and unwilling to cover large inferential distances, that we’ve lost the ability to understand difficult ideas like those of Hegel.

I am the first type of person by temperament, but trying to become more sympathetic to the second way of thinking. Part of this is because on the rare occasions I do understand something difficult, I am acutely aware of all the people accusing it of being a confusing mass of jargon disguising a lack of real insight – and of how wrong these people are. “Ha ha, look at all these smart erudite domain experts who believe a stupid thing, that just proves smart domain experts lack common sense” now seems like a huge failure mode to me. There’s also a certain intellectual version of Chesterton’s Fence which looks kind of like “Don’t dismiss an idea until you can see why it would be so tempting for other people to believe”. Right now I don’t see the temptation in Hegel or for that matter any of Continental philosophy. That half of the philosophical universe, including many people who display objective signs of brilliance – has decided to just wallow in pointless obscurantism seems to beggar belief.

My inability to be tempted by Hegel brings me to another point: what parts of my thought, right now, are Hegelian? Hegel seems like a classic case where we should read history of philosophy backwards – if almost all philosophical thought for fifty to a hundred years was Hegelian, modernity should be absolutely saturated with Hegelian ideas. That means I might get less gain from trying to read Hegel forward (to see if he has startling insights I didn’t know) and more gain from trying to read him backwards (to see if he is the source of things I assumed unquestioningly, and that negating them – as the contingent opinions of some German guy who thought 19th century Prussia was objectively perfect – would produce startling insights).

I don’t know enough Hegel to do a good job of this. One easy target might be the modern belief in human progress or linear history. Fukuyama (“The End of History”) writes:

For better or worse, much of Hegel’s historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progresses through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave owning, theocratic, and finally democratic egalitarian societies, has become inseparable form the modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed “natural” attributes. The mastery and transformation of man’s natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment — a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious

But I find both more unexpected and more plausible David Chapman’s theories that Hegel inspired modern Westernized Buddhism, the hippie movement, and the New Age. He breaks his arguments into a bunch of posts that aren’t really collected in any organized way, but I would recommend An Improbable Re-Animation, Bad Ideas From Dead Germans, and Zen vs. The US Navy. Chapman’s argument isn’t very developed, but just raising the idea is enough to make its evidential support obvious. Hegel’s system was based around the principle that the key principle of the universe was a divine Mind trying to find itself, that everything was interrelated and purposeful, that as this Mind became more self-aware it would be reflected in increasing levels of consciousness among human beings culminating in an ideal utopian social arrangement. This is the daaaaaawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius…

Philosophy makes for strange bedfellows. Imagine: December 21, 2012. A ray of crystal light emerges from the Temple of Kukulcan in the Mayan ruins, piercing the center of the Milky Way. Humans ascend to a new level of consciousness. And all around the world people throw off their shackles and self-organize into intentional communities exactly resembling early 19th century Prussia.

I’m not embarassed for choosing Singer’s Marx: A Very Short Introduction as a jumping-off point for learning more leftist philosophy. I weighed the costs and benefits of reading primary sources versus summaries and commentaries, and decided in favor of the latter.

The clincher was that the rare times I felt like I really understand certain thinkers and philosophies on a deep level, it’s rarely been the primary sources that did it for me, even when I’d read them. It’s only after hearing a bunch of different people attack the same idea from different angles that I’ve gotten the gist of it. The primary sources – especially when they’re translated, especially when they’re from the olden days before people discovered how to be interesting – just turn me off. Singer is a known person who can think and write clearly, and his book was just about the shortest I could find, so I jumped on it, hoping I would find a more sympathetic portrayal of someone whom my society has been trying to cast as a demon or monster.

And I don’t know if this is an artifact of Singer or a genuine insight into Marx, but as far as I can tell he’s even worse than I thought.

I.

What really clinched this for me was the discussion of Marx’s (lack of) description of how to run a communist state. I’d always heard that Marx was long on condemnations of capitalism and short on blueprints for communism, and the couple of Marx’s works I read in college confirmed he really didn’t talk about that very much. It seemed like a pretty big gap.

But I’d always dismissed this as an excusable error. When I was really young – maybe six or seven – I fancied myself a great inventor. The way I would invent something – let’s say a spaceship – was to draw a picture of a spaceship. I would label it with notes like “engine goes here” and “power source here” and then rest on my laurels, satisfied that I had invented interstellar travel at age seven. It always confused me that adults, who presumably should be pretty smart, had failed to do this. Occasionally I would bring this up to someone like my parents, and they would ask a question like “Okay, but how does the power source work?” and I would answer “Through quantum!” and then get very annoyed that people didn’t even know about quantum.

(I was seven years old. What’s your excuse, New Age community?)

I figured that Marx had just fallen into a similar trap. He’d probably made a few vague plans, like “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers,” and “Property will be held in common and consensus democracy will choose who gets what,” and felt like the rest was just details. That’s the sort of error I could at least sympathize with, despite its horrendous consequences.

But in fact Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say “It is irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work.” He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out. Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.

Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact. So once the World-Spirit resolves the dichotomy between Capitalist and Proletariat, then it can more completely incarnate itself and move on to the next problem. Except that this is the final problem (the proof of this is trivial and is left as exercise for the reader) so the World-Spirit becomes fully incarnate and everything is great forever. And you want to plan for how that should happen? Are you saying you know better than the World-Spirit, Comrade?

I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

II.

Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”, and I had always thought that complaint was unfair. Like sure, liberals say that you can make people less racist, and one could counterargue that a tendency toward racism is inborn, but it sure seems like you can make that tendency more or less strongly expressed and that this is important. This is part of the view I argue in Nature Is Not A Slate, It’s A Series Of Levers.

But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.

And:

It is evidence that economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form

Which Singer glosses with:

This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation.

I understand this is still a matter of some debate in the Marxist community. But it seems to me that if Singer is right, if this is genuinely Marx’s view, it seems likely to be part of what contributed to his inexcusable error above.

You or I, upon hearing that the plan is to get rid of all government and just have people share all property in common, might ask questions like “But what if someone wants more than their share?” Marx had no interest in that question, because he believed that there was no such thing as human nature, and things like “People sometimes want more than their shares of things” are contingent upon material relations and modes of production, most notably capitalism. If you get rid of capitalism, human beings change completely, such that “wanting more than your share” is no more likely than growing a third arm.

A lot of the liberals I know try to distance themselves from people like Stalin by saying that Marx had a pure original doctrine that they corrupted. But I am finding myself much more sympathetic to the dictators and secret police. They may not have been very nice people, but they were, in a sense, operating in Near Mode. They couldn’t just tell themselves “After the Revolution, no one is going to demand more than their share,” because their philosophies were shaped by the experience of having their subordinates come up to them and say “Boss, that Revolution went great, but now someone’s demanding more than their share, what should we do?” Their systems seem to be part of the unavoidable collision of Marxist doctrine with reality. It’s possible that there are other, better ways to deal with that collision, but “returning to the purity of Marx” doesn’t seem like a workable option.

III.

There was one part that made me more sympathetic to Marx. Singer writes:

Marx saw that the liberal definition of freedom is open to a fundamental objection. Suppose I live in the suburbs and work in the city. I could drive my car to work, or take the bus. I prefer not to wait around for the bus, and so I take my car. Fifty thousand other people living in my suburb face the same choice and make the same decision. The road to town is choked with cars. It takes each of us an hour to travel ten miles. In this situation, according to the liberal conception of freedom, we have all chosen freely. Yet the outcome is something none of us want. If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could cover the distance in twenty minutes. Even with the inconvenience of waiting at the bus stop, we would all prefer that. We are, of course, free to alter our choice of transportation, but what can we do? While so many cars slow the bus down, why should any individual choose differently? The liberal conception of freedom has led to a paradox: we have each chosen in our own interests, but the result is in no one’s interest. Individual rationality, collective irrationality…

Marx saw that capitalism involves this kind of collective irrationality. In precapitalist systems it was obvious that most people did not control their own destiny – under feudalism, for instance, serfs had to work for their lords. Capitalism seems different because people are in theory free to work for themselves or for others as they choose. Yet most workers have as little control over their lives as feudal serfs. This is not because they have chosen badly, nor is it because of the physical limits of our resources and technology. It is because the cumulative effect of countless individual choices is a society that no one – not even the capitalists – has chosen. Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control our own society.

This is good. In fact, this is the insight that I spent about fifteen years of my life looking for, ever since I first discovered libertarianism and felt like there was definitely an important problem with it, but couldn’t quite verbalize what it was. It’s something I finally figured out only within the last year or so and didn’t fully write up until Meditations on Moloch. And Marx seems to have sort of had it. I read the relevant section of Marx when I was younger, where he was talking about how capitalists would compete each other into the ground whether they wanted to or not, and I remember dismissing it with a “capitalists have not competed each other into the ground, for this this and this reason”, dismissing the incorrect object-level argument without realizing the important meta-level insight beneath it (something I have since learned to stop doing). If Marx really had that meta-level insight – really had it, and not just stumbled across a couple of useful examples of it without realizing the pattern – then that would make his fame justly deserved.

But two things here discourage me. First, Marx seems so confused about everything that it’s hard to parse him as really understanding this, as opposed to simply noticing one example of it that serves as a useful argument against capitalism. Second, the insight does not seem original to Marx. Tragedy of the commons was understood as early as 1833 and Malthus was talking about similar problems related to population explosions before Marx was even born. John Stuart Mill, writing twenty years before Das Kapital, had already explained the basic principle quite well:

To a fourth case of exception I must request particular attention, it being one to which as it appears to me, the attention of political economists has not yet been sufficiently drawn. There are matters in which the interference of law is required, not to overrule the judgment of individuals respecting their own interest, but to give effect to that judgment: they being unable to give effect to it except by concert, which concert again cannot be effectual unless it receives validity and sanction from the law. For illustration, and without prejudging the particular point, I may advert to the question of diminishing the hours of labour. Let us suppose, what is at least supposable, whether it be the fact or not—that a general reduction of the hours of factory labour, say from ten to nine,*119 would be for the advantage of the workpeople: that they would receive as high wages, or nearly as high, for nine hours’ labour as they receive for ten. If this would be the result, and if the operatives generally are convinced that it would, the limitation, some may say, will be adopted spontaneously. I answer, that it will not be adopted unless the body of operatives bind themselves to one another to abide by it. A workman who refused to work more than nine hours while there were others who worked ten, would either not be employed at all, or if employed, must submit to lose one-tenth of his wages. However convinced, therefore, he may be that it is the interest of the class to work short time, it is contrary to his own interest to set the example, unless he is well assured that all or most others will follow it. But suppose a general agreement of the whole class: might not this be effectual without the sanction of law? Not unless enforced by opinion with a rigour practically equal to that of law. For however beneficial the observance of the regulation might be to the class collectively, the immediate interest of every individual would lie in violating it: and the more numerous those were who adhered to the rule, the more would individuals gain by departing from it.

So one might apply to Marx the old cliche: that he has much that is good and original, but what is good is not original and what is original is not good.

But it is interesting to analyze Marx as groping toward something game theoretic. This comes across to me in some of his discussions of labor. Marx thinks all value is labor. Yes, capital is nice, but in a sense it is only “crystallized labor” – the fact that a capitalist owns a factory only means that at some other point he got laborers to build a factory for him. So labor does everything, but it gets only a tiny share of the gains produced. This is because capitalists are oppressing the laborers. Once laborers realize what’s up, they can choose to labor in such a way as to give themselves the full gains of their labor.

I think here that he is thinking of coordination as something that happens instantly in the absence of any obstacle to coordination, and the obstacle to coordination is the capitalists and the “false consciousness” they produce. Remove the capitalists, and the workers – who represent the full productive power of humanity – can direct that productive power to however it is most useful. In my language, Marx simply assumed the invisible nation, thought that the result of perfect negotiation by ideal game theoretic agents with 100% cooperation under a veil of ignorance – would also be the result of real negotiation in the real world, as long as there were no capitalists involved. Maybe this idea – of gradually approaching the invisible nation – is what stood in for the World-Spirit in his dialecticalism. Maybe in 1870, this sort of thinking was excusable.

If capitalists are to be thought of as anything other than parasites, part of the explanation of their contribution has to involve coordination. If Marx didn’t understand that coordination is just as hard to produce as linen or armaments or whatever, if he thought you could just assume it, then capitalists seem useless and getting rid of all previous forms of government so that insta-coordination can solve everything seems like a pretty swell idea.

If you admit that, capitalists having disappeared, there’s still going to be competition, positive and negative sum games, free rider problems, tragedies of the commons, and all the rest, then you’ve got to invent a system that solves all of those issues better than capitalism does. That seems to be the real challenge Marxist intellectuals should be setting themselves, and I hope to eventually discover some who have good answers to it. But at least from the little I learned from Singer, I see no reason to believe Marx had the clarity of thought to even understand the question.

Here are two comments I’ve gotten on this blog in the past few weeks:

Progressivism is under massive selective pressure to actually cause problems because that leads to more power for progressivism.

Sasha and Malia Obama will get affirmative action, even though their own father has publicly admitted its ridiculous. Therefore, black elites have a stake in keeping black masses as poor and miserable as possible, to continue justifying affirmative action.

These seem like they can be easily dismissed as conspiracy theories, but what is the exact structure of that dismissal?

Well, first, it requires that people have an almost comical level of evil. Think of the Secretary of Health and Human Services noticing that, if she enacted terrible policies that made everyone in the country sick, people would demand more resources for health care and her empire would grow. It’s hard for me to imagine someone that Slytherin.

Second, it sounds like it requires literal conspiracy. In the second example, one of two things must happen. Either every black elite has to come up with the plan independently and work together in synchrony to carry it out – each taking it on faith that the other elites are doing their part. Or one person has to come up with the plan, convince everyone else that that’s the plan, and send them their marching orders (“You! Do your part to help keep the masses poor by voting against this much-needed education reform!”), all without the media catching wind of any of this.

Third, this makes the same mistake I accused Marx of in the last post. It assumes a free solution to all coordination problems.

Suppose we grant the conspiracy theorists their point that it is indeed in the interest of all black elites to keep the black masses poor so they can benefit from affirmative action. Suppose we even grant that they are evil enough to want to try this plan despite the suffering it will produce. And suppose they’re all really good at communicating through heavily encrypted email, so we solve the conspiracy aspect. The plan still doesn’t work.

Every elite benefits from the entire plan being pulled off. But now there’s a free rider problem. Each elite would have to expend some individual effort to keep everybody else down. Maybe it’s going out of their way to rally opposition to a useful reform. Maybe it’s having to take an unpopular position and so looking like the bad guy. All I’m saying is that quashing the dreams of the next generation of minority children is harder than sitting on your tuchus playing video games. Their own contribution doesn’t help the cause very much on net, so their incentive is to defect and hope everyone else does it.

Just as good people playing normal politics have a hard time rallying support for genuinely important causes like stopping global warming or enforcing Net Neutrality, so evil people playing Conspiracy Politics should have a hard time convincing their target demographic to get out of bed and join in their oppression.

But in fact they have it much harder. Good people playing normal politics can use a host of techniques – phone banks, door-to-door campaigns, benefit concerts, leaflets in the mail, celebrity endorsements – to rally people to action. Evil people playing Conspiracy Politics can’t do any of that without greatly increasing their risk of getting caught.

And when good people do rally the masses to their cause, it seems to be through an appeal to morality. Like “Yes, I know it would be much easier for you to sit back and let other people solve global warming, but you have an ethical responsibility to participate in this, and won’t you feel good about yourself knowing you’ve made a difference.”

Obviously if your campaign is “Cause as many problems as possible to increase the size of government” this is harder to pull off.

This seems to me to be a little-acknowledged third reason to dismiss conspiracy theories of this sort. But you don’t care. You’ve already wandered off, wondering why I’m wasting my time debunking things nobody (except apparently the rare SSC commenter) believes anyway.

But what if we apply this to more common claims? What about class warfare?

It is widely believed that the rich have captured government for their own ends. For example, rich people use their money and power to decrease tax rates on the wealthy and sabotage legislation meant to protect the working man.

But this ought to fall victim to the same coordination problems. After all, suppose you are a rich person who makes $1 million per year. You would like the government to cut federal taxes on the wealthy from 40% down to 30%, which would save you $100,000 per year. One might think you would be willing to spend up to $100,000 to effect this goal.

But in fact it requires the concerted effort of all the rich people across the country to make this happen. A single $100,000 donation isn’t going to change federal level policy in such a spectacular way. Realistically your effort will be a drop in a bucket that your entire class needs to contribute to.

Once again we encounter free rider problems. Suppose a representative of the Rich People’s Union asks for a $10,000 donation to fight for lower taxes. There are hundreds of thousands of rich people, so you’re pretty sure your one donation isn’t going to push anything over the edge one way or the other. Supposing the tax cut goes through, you will get the same benefit whether you donated or not; supposing it doesn’t, you won’t gain anything either way. It’s easy to see that in either case the rational self-interested thing to do is to refuse to donate.

There are a couple of rare exceptions to this. If you are Bill Gates and make a billion dollars a year, so that you would gain $100 million from the tax cut, it might be worth bribing the necessary legislators all on your own, on the grounds that if something needs to be done right you had better do it yourself. Likewise, if you’re Exxon Mobil or the Koch brothers, then you might be a big enough chunk of the target population for certain specific environmental regulations that it’s worth using your own money to fight it whether or not others join in.

But a general focus on the interests of the rich? Not likely.

Yet the rich do seem to get their way a disproportionate amount of the time, and this seems to require an explanation.

I am reminded of the research I looked at in Plutocracy Isn’t About Money. People seem to donate surprisingly little to political candidates, and donations don’t seem to help. This seems consistent with the idea that rich people don’t directly coordinate to bribe politicians in their favor. I suggested a couple of different hypotheses, like that maybe the rich win because of “soft power” – ie the media and universities and politicians are mostly rich or are run by rich people who just sort of naturally let their opinions percolate through without much deliberate effort.

An alternative explanation preserves our intuitive belief that the rich sure do seem to influence politics a lot. Maybe rich people, like poor people, participate in politics because of sincere belief in their moral values, and their values are by what seems a weird coincidence the ones that help make them richer.

Like, Mitt Romney’s zillion-dollar-a-plate fundraisers seem to always be pretty full. It can’t literally be in a rich person’s self-interest to buy a plate there. But a lot of rich people could have conservative-libertarian-pro-business ideas that encourage them to quasi-altruistically support Mitt Romney in order to push their values.

But this is really weird and interesting – much more interesting than it looks. It suggests that, in the presence of a useful selfish goal to coordinate around, a value system will “spring up” that convinces people to support it for altruistic reasons.

I’m not just talking about normal altruism here. A rich person motivated by normal altruism per se might be against tax cuts for the rich, in order to better preserve social services for the less fortunate. And I’m not just talking about normal selfishness either. A rich person motivated by selfishness would hang out in his mansion all day instead of wasting money on fundraisers. I’m talking about a moral system which is genuinely self-sacrificing on the individual level, but which when universalized has the effect of helping the rich person get richer.

It’s worth thinking about this in contractarian terms. A rich person, minus the veil of ignorance, wouldn’t support everyone pitching in to help the poor, because he knows he’s not poor and so gains nothing. A rich person, minus the veil of ignorance, would support a binding pact among all rich people to pitch in to support tax cuts on the rich, because she knows she would gain more than she loses from such an agreement.

But as far as I can tell, this calculation is never made on a conscious level. What happens on a conscious level is the rich person finds themselves supporting some moral philosophy – libertarianism, Objectivism, prosperity gospel, whatever – which says it is morally wrong to raise taxes on the rich, so much so that one should altruistically make personal sacrifices in order to stop them from being raised. And then these moral philosophies spread, and without any conscious awareness, the rich people find themselves coordinating very nicely to protect their class interests.

I hope you agree that if this is true, it is spooky. I admit on this blog I sometimes mock human nature and human cognition a little too much, but this particular cognitive process is really impressive. I hope whatever angel designed it got a promotion.

So although I haven’t really thought this through too much, I would suggest a dichotomy. Either there’s some sort of spooky system that generates heartfelt moral philosophies on demand to solve coordination problems, or the rich aren’t actually coordinating and just consistently keep getting lucky.

I don’t like this because it raises more questions than it answers. Why don’t the poor coordinate this well? Too many of them? And if this is true, how sure should we be of our previous belief that the Secretary of Health and Human Services isn’t coordinating with all the other progressive bureaucrats to deliberately cause social problems?

Today I had several more terrible lectures on ADHD.

In one of them, I was informed that America is medicalizing normal childhood mischief and loading anyone who gets worse than a B+ up with Ritalin or amphetamines as part of the pathologization of everyday life.

In another, I was informed that ADHD is shamefully underdiagnosed and most of the children who need stimulants most are going without them and failing school unnecessarily, so we need better screening programs and more efforts to seek out potential sufferers of the condition.

So I asked one of my attendings, Dr. L, which one it was. Are we overdosing ADHD? Or underdiagnosing it?

He answered that we are both overdiagnosing and underdiagnosing ADHD, the same as every other psychiatric disease, and then explained this so it made perfect sense and I was embarassed for not realizing it before.

Suppose that 3% of the population has ADHD.

Suppose that of people with ADHD, 50% of them realize they have ADHD like symptoms and go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.

Suppose that of people without ADHD, 10% of them falsely believe they have ADHD and also go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.

The Conners Continuous Performance Test is a commonly used test that evaluates children for ADHD. It is found to have a sensitivity of 75% and a specificity of 73%. In theory our system is based on faith that a trained psychiatrist can do better than a neuropsychological test; in practice they probably do much worse. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say this is an excellent psychiatrist who outperforms the test handily and has both a sensitivity and specificity of 85%.

We can see that of every 100 people, 3 will have ADHD and 97 won’t. 1.5 true patients and 9.7 false patients will show up for psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist will diagnose 1.275 true patients and 1.455 false patients with the condition, and prescribes stimulants according to the diagnosis.

So we have three things that, surprisingly, all happen at once:

1. We have an excellent psychiatrist who outperforms the tests and is right 85% of the time.
2. The majority of people who are on Ritalin, shouldn’t be.
3. The majority of people who should be on Ritalin, aren’t.

Number two sounds a lot like what we mean by “overdiagnosis”, and number three sounds a lot like what we mean by “underdiagnosis”. So even with a pretty good psychiatrist acting honestly, we expect ADHD to be both overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed at the same time.

Even in conditions that do not quite satisfy the “majority” part of (2) and (3), we might still expect it to be true at the same time that a sizeable chunk of people diagnosed with the disease don’t have it and a sizeable chunk of people with the disease aren’t diagnosed.

If this seems counterintuitive, it is just another example of the annoying world of medical sensitivity and specificity statistics, which are constantly tripping up even the most experienced doctors. See also the infamous mammogram problem.

Once I understood this joint-overdiagnosis-and-underdiagnosis problem, several other candidate situations immediately leapt to mind. Antidepressants are almost certainly both overprescribed and underprescribed. So are opiate pain medications.

Not all the relevant examples are medical. I was reminded of Athrelon’s recent attempts to explain to me his version of the far-right concept of anarcho-tyranny. At first this didn’t make sense to me – how could there be anarchy and tyranny at the same time? Athrelon was able to walk me through the logic, which it turns out is the exact same as above. Imagine the government as trying to “diagnose” the situations where it needs to use force, and over- and under- diagnosing them at the same time. He will make this into a blog post soon, and I will link you to it.

Athrelon is a doctor. This may or may not be a coincidence. Sensitivity and specificity statistics are weird.

Jeff Kaufman wades through conflicting claims about the effectiveness of SAT coaching.

And speaking of which: Scott Aaronson endorses Steven Pinker’s critique of the college admissions process, which you might remember from the last links post here. Yet another very persuasive essay. Key quote: “I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.”

Related to a recent conversation here: How To Fake Your Way Through Hegel. (h/t Oligopsony)

We don’t really know anything about the the London Stone except that it’s been called “the London Stone” and considered important in some way since at least 1100. Unproven theories include a Druidic cult object, the milestone marking the center of Roman Britain, a magical talisman protecting the city, and the stone from which King Arthur pulled his sword. It is currently in a little case built into the front of a bookstore.

Civilization: Beyond Earth (unofficially: “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri II”) is available for pre-order for its October 24 release and has been gradually releasing faction information. They have a tough job: they need to live up to the beloved factions of their predecessors, match them to real-world countries, have them be sufficiently different to be interesting, and avoid the trap where there is the Generic Military Faction which thinks Strength Is The Greatest Good and the Generic Religious Faction which wants to Kill The Infidel. Currently I rate them a “C”. The Slavic Federation seems almost perfectly generic, the People’s African Union takes the easiest angle possible, the Polystralians are best described as “cute, I guess”, and only the Kavithan Protectorate seems to show slight signs of anything unexpected or creative. Given how burnt I felt after pre-ordering Civilization V, and this game’s reliance on the same engine, I might just wait and see.

Indian officials are investigating how the monkey god Hanuman got issued an official biometric identity card. Also: whose fingerprints and iris are those on there?

California bans Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar from offering carpool services at a lower price. I feel safer already. Don’t you feel safer?

My mother has been a school teacher for a long time, and she swears the kids are getting worse every year. This claim interested me when I first heard it, but I didn’t have any way to investigate. I still don’t, but AskReddit: Teachers Who Have Been Teaching For 20+ Years, How Are The Students Different? suggests that a lot of other people feel the same way. Although many of them think of it less as a gradual decline and more of a one-time drop around the late ’90s or so. Theories welcome.

A Survivor style gameshow where a Republican and Democratic senator compete to make it on an uninhabited desert island will air on the Discovery Channel next month. Key quote: “We can promise you a happy ending — even if it’s only two fewer senators.”

Someone on Reddit asks for the most interesting Google Maps street view scenes, and the site did not disappoint. Also, my home city.

I will always link other people suggesting lithium in the water supply, especially if it’s the New York Times.

As we discuss whether the earning premium for a college degree represents genuine learned skills, signaling value, or a simple proxy for class, it’s worth noting that prostitutes with college degrees earn 31% more than those without.

A new study uses high-powered genetic clustering techniques to show that schizophrenia is actually eight distinct genetic disorders. Now something like this is almost certainly true, in that there are probably many very different ways you can end up with schizophrenia. On the other hand, there have been lots of attempts to do this sort of thing before and the statistics involved are notoriously iffy – even assuming the relevant axis along which to divide types of schizophrenia is indeed genetic. In any case, whether this is true or not I expect it to be ignored by psychiatry for at least ten years, until (if?) it gets replicated a few times and people find something useful you can do with the information.

I often talk about the contractarian idea that you shouldn’t cause trouble for your neighbors if you wouldn’t want your neighbors causing trouble for you, and I’ve specifically cited disruptive protests as a good example, but it usually stays pretty hypothetical. But here’s a town where the local pastor sent religious people to picket a strip club, and the strip club owner retaliated by sending strippers to picket the church

Obsidian, one of the oldest substances used by mankind to make tools, still has the sharpest edge of anything known, so much so that obsidian scalpels make surgery safer than the traditional sort.

Before they settled on killing the Jews of Europe, the Nazis had a more creative plan: send them all to Madagascar. They hoped that after taking over Britain they could use the British merchant fleet to transport them, with the voyages being funded by confiscated Jewish assets. Imagine a world in which the plan was successful – say all European Jews deported to Madagascar – but the Nazis were defeated on schedule and the victorious allies declared Madagascar the world Jewish homeland instead of Israel. Sure, we would probably end up debating apartheid in Madagascar with the same fervency as the Gaza War. But the Madagascaraelis would have twenty times the land area of Israel, probably at least double the population (since it would include the six million murdered Europeans) and infinitely more farmland and natural resources. And they would be on a basically uninvade-able island. Between the land God promised us and the land Hitler promised us, I’m kinda going with advantage Hitler here. At the very least it would make good alternate history.

Hair Color Stereotyping And CEO Selection In The United Kingdom. Of the top 500 CEOs in the United Kingdom, 5% have blond hair, compared to 25% of the general population. Evidence of prejudice? Seems possible, although that is a scary large effect. Study also says none of the CEOs were non-white (removes possible confounder, but seems hard for me to believe – I know there’s prejudice, but seriously, 0/500?) and only two were women (which means that this is apparently a prejudice against blond hair in men). If true, this would be strong evidence in favor of the ability of prejudices to impede workplace advancement in a way that might be less confounded and politicized than real studies on race or gender or other more important things like that. But still want more evidence before I believe that blond hair cuts men’s chances of advancement by 80%.

Vox: The Democrats And Republicans Really Are Different. Some political scientists suggest that the Democrats and Republicans aren’t just mirror images of each other, but that they represent fundamentally different sorts of coalitions. The Democrats are a more practical coalition of a bunch of different interest groups, and the Republicans are a more ideologically motivated group of small-government true-believers. This asymmetry reflects a second asymmetry; because policy more often expands than contracts government, and it’s easier to enact policy than reverse it, Republicans are more comfortable with gridlock and dysfunction, which shapes their strategy. Reminds me of Land on the ratchet.

NASA makes the safest and most boring decision possible and chooses both Boeing and SpaceX as joint leaders in the contract to create the next generation of American manned spacecraft. The Reddit comment thread makes a pretty interesting point: Boeing is getting paid $4 billion and SpaceX $2 billion for the exact same service (1 spaceship meeting certain requirements). The reason: Boeing said they could do it for $4 billion, SpaceX said they could do it for $2 billion, and NASA gave both of them what they asked for. That’ll teach SpaceX to dare try to be cost-effective when seeking government bids! But others suggest a more complicated picture, where NASA will experiment to see if they can succeed with such low expenses, and if so they may have won themselves preferential treatment next time.

Less Wrong: Superintelligence Reading Group

The history of spies seducing people. Key quote: “When the KGB tried to blackmail Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno with videotapes of the president having sex with Russian women disguised as flight attendants, Sukarno wasn’t upset. He was pleased. He even asked for more copies of the video to show back in his country.”

What Can Evolutionary Biologists Learn From Creationists? Love thine enemy, for he teaches you the parts of your theory that need further investigation. H/t Dia Pente.

Teen drug and alcohol use continue to fall due to new anti-drug programs, according to same logic by which all rain dances work eventually.

Jeff Kaufman: Policies That Would Probably Make Us A Lot Better Off. Please assume this represents the closest thing to a Consensus Rationalist Opinion on politics. Or at least that it’s closer to such than what random people on Tumblr accuse us of believing.

Seen on Tumblr: “When you hear this joke about Russell’s Paradox, you won’t be able to contain yourself.”

I’m off to California for the weekend to attend Alicorn and Mike’s wedding, so don’t expect much SSC for a few days. Here’s an Open Thread to keep you occupied till then.

1. Comments of the “month” are Robby on idealism in Continental philosophy and Anatoly on giraffe sex.

2. Frequent SSC commenter Ialdabaoth has unfairly fallen on some hard times, and also-frequent-SSC-commenter Elissa is asking us to help him out:

I’m posting here on behalf of Brent Dill, known here and elsewhere as ialdabaoth. If you read the comments at SSC, you’ll recognize him as a contributor of rare honesty and insight. If you read Less Wrong, you may have enjoyed some of his posts. If you’d had the chance to talk with him as much as I have, you’d know he’s an awesome guy: clever, resourceful, incisive and deeply moral. Many of you see him as admirable, most as relatable, some as a friend, and more, I hope, as a member of our community.

He could use some help.

Until last Thursday he was gainfully employed as a web developer for a community college in Idaho. Recently, he voluntarily mentioned to his boss that he was concerned that seasonal affective disorder was harming his job performance, who mentioned it to his boss, who suggested in all good faith that Brent should talk to HR to see if they might help through their Employee Assistance Program. In Brent’s words: “Instead, HR asked me a lot of pointed questions about when my performance could turn around and whether I wanted to work there, demanded that I come up with all the solutions (after I admitted that I was already out of brainpower and feeling intimidated), and then directed me to turn in my keys and go home, and that HR would call me on Monday to tell me the status of my employment.” Now, at the end of the day Tuesday, they still haven’t let him know what’s happening, but it doesn’t look good.

I think we can agree that this is some of the worst horseshit.

On the other hand, he’s been wanting to get out of Idaho and into a city with an active rationalist community for a while, so in a sense this is an opportunity.
Ways to help: Brent needs, in order of priority: a job, a place to stay, and funds to cover living and moving expenses– details below. Signal boosts and messages of support are also helpful and appreciated.
Ways NOT to help: Patronizing advice/other-optimizing (useful information is of course welcome), variations on ‘cool story bro’ (the facts here have been corroborated to my satisfaction with hard-to-fake evidence), disrespect in general.

1. Job: Leads and connections would help more than anything else. He’s looking to end up, again, in a good-sized city with an active rationalist community. Candidates include the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Columbus, San Diego, maybe DC or Ann Arbor. He has an excessively complete resume here, but, in short: C#/.NET and SQL developer, also computer game development experience, tabletop board/card game design experience, graphic art and user interface experience, and some team leadership / management experience.

2. Crash space: If you are in one of the above cities, do you have/know of a place for a guy and his cat? How much will it cost, and when will it be available? Probably he’ll ultimately want a roommate situation, but if you’re willing to put him up for a short time that’s also useful information.

3. Funds: Brent is not now in immediate danger of going hungry or homeless, but a couple of months will exhaust his savings, and (although it is hard to know in the current state of things) he has been told that the circumstances constitute “cause” sufficient to keep him from drawing unemployment. Moving will almost certainly cost more than he has on hand. There is a possible future in which he runs out of money stranded in Idaho, which would be not good.

If you feel moved to help, he has set up a gofundme account here. (the goal amount is set at his calculated maximum expenses, but any amount at all would help and be greatly appreciated– he would have preferred not to set a funding goal at all.) Though Brent has pledged to eventually donate double the amount he raises to Effective Altruist causes, we wouldn’t like you to confuse contributing here with charitable giving. Rather, you might want to give in order to show your appreciation for his writing, or to express your solidarity in the struggles and stigma around mental illness, or as a gesture of friendship and community, or just to purchase fuzzies. Also, you can make him do stuff on Youtube, you know, if you want.
Thank you so much for your time and kindness.

I don’t yet have a principled policy on when I will and won’t signal-boost requests for help but I hope it doesn’t reach the point where I have to form one.

3. SOMEONE (who wishes to remain anonymous) MADE FANART OF ME!!!

Click to expand

PS: NO RACE OR GENDER IN THE OPEN THREAD THAT NEVER HELPS

[I gave a speech at Mike Blume and Hannah "Alicorn" Blume's wedding on Sunday. Some of the guests suggested I post it here for more general consumption. Content warning: polyamory.]

I’ve been asked to give an impromptu speech. Specifically, I was asked six months ago, when Hannah messaged me and said “You need to give an impromptu speech at my wedding. You’ve got six months to get it sounding impromptu enough.”

But I’ve been thinking about this day for even longer than that. The first time Hannah and I talked about her wedding was…maybe three or four years ago. She was staying at my house in Southern California on her way to Anna and Carl’s wedding. And this was actually an Important Historic Occasion, because the next night when she stayed in San Diego, in order to save money she shared a hotel room with a certain Michael Blume and the rest is history. But at the time they weren’t together, and Hannah and I were – kind of half-dating, I don’t think we had actually started dating at the time, but we were flirting. And Hannah asked if I was going to go to the wedding the next day, and I said no, I couldn’t stand weddings, I hated weddings, I would do whatever I could to avoid them.

And she looked at me with big eyes and said “But…you’ll come to my wedding? Right?”

I said: “Mumble mumble maybe mumble try.”

Hannah wouldn’t take that as an answer and demanded to know my probability that I would come to her wedding.

I remember what I answered. It was something like “Fifty percent. Rising to ninety percent, if I’m the groom.”

And that didn’t work out, but I still find that now that the time is here I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Hannah is stll one of my favorite people. When I was out of a job and had no idea what I was going to do with my life, Hannah kind of saved me and gave me a place to live in Berkeley and threw me at her friend group so hard I have never been able to extract myself since. I have known her for five years now, I dated her for about three, I lived with her for one. And in the end, my only regret about attending her wedding was that it means I am visiting Berkeley on the ONE weekend that she’s not throwing a dinner party with her home cooking.

I’ve known Mike for a lot shorter, only about two years. Which is too bad, because it means that there were all these years of my life when I could have known Mike, but didn’t, which is a tragic waste. Mike is kind of like the Platonic ideal of the Good – to know him is to love him. I remember one Facebook thread where someone posted “Mike Blume is so nice and helpful dreamy” to their wall, and it ended up ballooning to like a hundred likes and comments from people agreeing with the sentiment.

I was looking for that thread the other day so I could quote it, and I couldn’t find it. The reason I couldn’t find it was that I kept asking people – “Do you remember who posted that Facebook thread praising Mike for being really nice and attractive and helpful?” – and they would say “Yeah, I think I was the one who posted that, it sounds like the sort of thing I would say.” And then they look and can’t find it, so I go to the next person, and they’re like “You know, I bet I was the one who posted that, it sounds like the sort of thing I would say…” and I never did find the thread. That is Mike.

So instead I hunted down something I once said about Mike once on my blog, which I would like to share with you today: “Hannah says Mike is her ‘happiness battery’, a source of emotional strength she can rely on to get her through difficult times. After living with him, I felt the same way, and he is at the center of so many social circles he might better be described as a giant happiness hydroelectric plant powering half of Northern California. The fact that flowers do not spring up everywhere he walks only proves that flowers are wrong.”

In fact, I took unfair advantage of this when I lived with Mike and Hannah to meet a steady stream of Mike groupies. That was how I met my current girlfriend Ozy – they dated Mike first. That was how I met my ex-girlfriend Kenzi, who officiated today – she dated Mike first. In fact, Mike and Kenzi were really good together. I used to wonder whether Hannah would marry Mike or Kenzi would marry Mike. I’m glad to see that they both married Mike, in different senses.

I’m trying to avoid using the phrase “emergent property” in a wedding speech, but I’ll say it – there is an emergent property to their relationship that makes them even better together than either one is alone. Their interactions with each other show such amazing mutual respect and love and complementarity that it adds new plausibility to the idea of soulmates. They are my model of how a good relationship ought to work. And one day, I hope some ambitious linguist will study their ability to communicate with each other entirely in adorable high-pitched noises (“eeeeeeeeeee!” “EEEEEEEEEEE!”)

I like Mike, and I like Hannah. But beyond either of them, I have a huge, huge crush on their relationship.

I want to marry their marriage.

I know my conservative friends tell me that we’re on a slippery slope, and soon people will be marrying animals, and trees, and rocks. And I can only hope that, somewhere at the bottom of that slope, someone legalizes man-relationship unions.

And when that happens, the rest of you, stay away! I called it first!

My friends got MARRIED!

But I’m sorry to get into politics at a time like this. Let’s talk about something more relevant. Let’s talk about population genetics.

A Dr. Joseph Chang of Yale University, using sophisticated statistical techniques, determined that ancestry mixes surprisingly quickly across populations. I promise this will become relevant. He found that beyond a certain horizon anybody who’s the ancestor of anybody in a population is the ancestor of everybody. The exact length changes depending on some assumptions, but for a relatively mixed population like descendants of Eurasians, it’s probably around fifteen hundred years. Some tribes on remote islands way out in the Pacific might be longer. Anyone from Papua New Guinea here today? No?

Then everyone here today is a descendent of Socrates. Everyone here today is a descendent of Confucius. Everyone here today is a descendent of Mohammed. Even if you don’t look much like him. Queen Elizabeth’s official genealogy confirms a descent from Mohammed, and she doesn’t look Middle Eastern either.

We’re all descendants of Nefertiti. The patriarch Abraham. The Japanese imperial line. Charlemagne. Qin Shih Huang Di. And not just genetically. We learned values from our parents that they learned from their parents that they learned from their parents and so on to Socrates or Mohammed or Charlemagne sitting their kids down at the dinner table and trying to teach them right from wrong.

Mike and Hannah met through the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, through the Visiting Fellows program at Benton-that-was. A lot of people here today are involved with MIRI, or other organizations trying to ensure the survival of humanity a thousand or two thousand years from now. And there’s a lot of discussion, within those circles, about what such a future would be like.

And I was reading about this population genetics stuff six months ago, at the same time Hannah asked me to write an impromptu speech, and it made me think.

Whatever else we’re celebrating with the ritual of marriage, we’re also celebrating this. We’re marking this incredibly audacious act of taking a genetic and memetic payload and shooting it into the far future, where it will spread further and further with every generation and eventually rewrite humankind.

And if we make it another fifteen hundred years as a biological species, someday we will have a world where everybody alive is a descendent of Mike and Hannah. And where everyone has received their values from someone who received their values who received their values…from Mike and Hannah.

And that’s pretty high up there for me as a reason to be incredibly excited about the whole project.

So, a toast. To Hannah. To Mike. To their relationship. And to the future.

Congratulations, guys.

(No pressure.)

I.

I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the entire matter for the World-Spirit to sort out. But almost everything that interests me about Communism falls under the category of “how communism would actually work”. Red Plenty, a semi-fictionalized account of the history of socialist economic planning, seemed like a natural follow-up.

But I’d had it on my List Of Things To Read for even longer than that, ever after stumbling across a quote from it on some blog or other:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded.

Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.

And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

Needless to say, this is Relevant To My Interests, which include among them poetic allegories for coordination problems. And I was not disappointed.

II.

The book begins:

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

And this was the first interesting thing I learned.

There’s a very settled modern explanation of the conflict between capitalism and communism. Capitalism is good at growing the economy and making countries rich. Communism is good at caring for the poor and promoting equality. So your choice between capitalism and communism is a trade-off between those two things.

But for at least the first fifty years of the Cold War, the Soviets would not have come close to granting you that these are the premises on which the battle must be fought. They were officially quite certain that any day now Communism was going to prove itself better at economic growth, better at making people rich quickly, than capitalism. Even unofficially, most of their leaders and economists were pretty certain of it. And for a little while, even their capitalist enemies secretly worried they were right.

The arguments are easy to understand. Under capitalism, plutocrats use the profits of industry to buy giant yachts for themselves. Under communism, the profits can be reinvested back into the industry to build more factories or to make production more efficient, increasing growth rate.

Under capitalism, everyone is competing with each other, and much of your budget is spent on zero-sum games like advertising and marketing and sales to give you a leg up over your competition. Under communism, there is no need to play these zero-sum games and that part of the budget can be reinvested to grow the industry more quickly.

Under capitalism, everyone is working against everyone else. If Ford discovers a clever new car-manufacturing technique, their first impulse is to patent it so GM can’t use it, and GM’s first impulse is to hire thousands of lawyers to try to thwart that attempt. Under communism, everyone is working together, so if one car-manufacturing collective discovers a new technique they send their blueprints to all the other car-manufacturing collectives in order to help them out. So in capitalism, each companies will possess a few individual advances, but under communism every collective will have every advance, and so be more productive.

These arguments make a lot of sense to me, and they definitely made sense to the Communists of the first half of the 20th century. As a result, they were confident of overtaking capitalism. They realized that they’d started with a handicap – czarist Russia had been dirt poor and almost without an industrial base – and that they’d faced a further handicap in having the Nazis burn half their country during World War II – but they figured as soon as they overcame these handicaps their natural advantages would let them leap ahead of the West in only a couple of decades. The great Russian advances of the 50s – Sputnik, Gagarin, etc – were seen as evidence that this was already starting to come true in certain fields.

And then it all went wrong.

III.

Grant that communism really does have the above advantages over capitalism. What advantage does capitalism have?

The classic answer is that during communism no one wants to work hard. They do as little as they can get away with, then slack off because they don’t reap the rewards of their own labor.

Red Plenty doesn’t really have theses. In fact, it’s not really a non-fiction work at all. It’s a dramatized series of episodes in the lives of Russian workers, politicians, and academics, intended to come together to paint a picture of how the Soviet economy worked.

But if I can impose a thesis upon the text, I don’t think it agreed with this. In certain cases, Russians were very well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”. Later, when the state became less murder-happy, the threat of death faded to threats of demotions, ruined careers, and transfer to backwater provinces. And there were equal incentives, in the form of promotion or transfer to a desirable location such as Moscow, for overperformance. There were even monetary bonuses, although money bought a lot less than it did in capitalist countries and was universally considered inferior to status in terms of purchasing power. Yes, there were Goodhart’s Law type issues going on – if you’re being judged per product, better produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products – but that wasn’t the crux of the problem.

Red Plenty presented the problem with the Soviet economy primarily as one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.

The book illustrated this reality with a series of stories (I’m not sure how many of these were true, versus useful dramatizations). In one, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for re-allocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.

A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. They learned that the tire-making-machine-making company had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and was back in the same quandary they’d started with.

It’s easy to see how all of these problems could have been solved (or would never have come up) in a capitalist economy, with its use of prices set by supply and demand as an allocation mechanism. And it’s easy to see how thoroughly the Soviet economy was sabotaging itself by avoiding such prices.

IV.

The “hero” of Red Plenty – although most of the vignettes didn’t involve him directly – was Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician who thought he could solve the problem. He invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better – this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.

During the “Khruschev thaw”, Kantorovich started getting some more politically adept followers, the higher-ups started taking note, and there was a real movement to get his ideas implemented. A few industries were run on Kantorovichian principles as a test case and seemed to do pretty well. There was an inevitable backlash. Opponents accused the linear programmers of being capitalists-in-disguise, which wasn’t helped by their use of something called “shadow prices”. But the combination of their own political adeptness and some high-level support from Khruschev – who alone of all the Soviet leaders seemed to really believe in his own cause and be a pretty okay guy – put them within arm’s reach of getting their plans implemented.

But when elements of linear programming were adopted, they were adopted piecemeal and toothless. The book places the blame on Alexei Kosygen, who implemented a bunch of economic reforms that failed, in a chapter that makes it clear exactly how constrained the Soviet leadership really was. You hear about Stalin, you imagine these guys having total power, but in reality they walked a narrow line, and all these “shadow prices” required more political capital than they were willing to mobilize, even when they thought Kantorovich might have a point.

V.

In the end, I was left with two contradictory impressions from the book.

First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was. You hear about how many stupid things were going on at every level, and you think: This was the country that built Sputnik and Mir? This was the country that almost buried us beneath the tide of history? It is a credit to the Russian people that they were able to build so much as a screwdriver in such conditions, let alone a space station.

But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

One of the book’s most frequently-hammered-in points was that there was was a brief moment, back during the 1950s, when everything seemed to be going right for Russia. Its year-on-year GDP growth (as estimated by impartial outside observers) was somewhere between 7 to 10%. Starvation was going down. Luxuries were going up. Kantorovich was fixing entire industries with his linear programming methods. Then Khruschev made a serious of crazy loose cannon decisions, he was ousted by Brezhnev, Kantorovich was pushed aside and ignored, the “Khruschev thaw” was reversed and tightened up again, and everything stagnated for the next twenty years.

If Khruschev had stuck around, if Kantorovich had succeeded, might the common knowledge that Communism is terrible at producing material prosperity look a little different?

The book very briefly mentioned a competing theory of resource allocation promoted by Victor Glushkov, a cyberneticist in Ukraine. He thought he could use computers – then a very new technology – to calculate optimal allocation for everyone. He failed to navigate the political seas as adroitly as Kantorovich’s faction, and the killing blow was a paper that pointed out that for him to do everything really correctly would take a hundred million years of computing time.

That was in 1960. If computing power doubles every two years, we’ve undergone about 25 doubling times since then, suggesting that we ought to be able to perform Glushkov’s calculations in three years – or three days, if we give him a lab of three hundred sixty five computers to work with. There could have been this entire field of centralized economic planning. Maybe it would have continued to underperform prices. Or maybe after decades of trial and error across the entire Soviet Union, it could have caught up. We’ll never know. Glushkov and Kantorovich were marginalized and left to play around with toy problems until their deaths in the 80s, and as far as I know their ideas were never developed further in the context of a national planned economy.

VI.

One of the ways people like insulting smart people, or rational people, or scientists, is by telling them they’re the type of people who are attracted to Communism. “Oh, you think you can control and understand everything, just like the Communists did.”

And I had always thought this was a pretty awful insult. The people I know who most identify as rationalists, or scientifically/technically minded, are also most likely to be libertarian. So there, case dismissed, everybody go home.

This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.

Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.

And in the end, they never got the chance. There’s an interpretation of Communism as a refutation of social science, here were these people who probably knew some social science, but did it help them run a state, no it didn’t. But from the little I learned about Soviet history from this book, this seems diametrically wrong. The Soviets had practically no social science. They hated social science. You would think they would at least have some good Marxists, but apparently Stalin killed all of them just in case they might come up with versions of Marxism he didn’t like, and in terms of a vibrant scholarly field it never recovered. Economics was tainted with its association with capitalism from the very beginning, and when it happened at all it was done by non-professionals. Kantorovich was a mathematician by training; Glushkov a computer scientist.

Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you.

Baggy two-piece suits are not the obvious costume for philosopher kings: but that, in theory, was what the apparatchiks who rule the Soviet Union in the 1960s were supposed to be. Lenin’s state made the same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier, when he proposed that enlightened intelligence gives absolute powers would serve the public good better than the grubby politicking of republics.

On paper, the USSR was a republic, a grand multi-ethnic federation of republics indeed and its constitutions (there were several) guaranteed its citizens all manner of civil rights. But in truth the Soviet system was utterly unsympathetic to the idea of rights, if you meant by them any suggestion that the two hundred million men, women and children who inhabited the Soviet Union should be autonomously fixing on two hundred million separate directions in which to pursue happiness. This was a society with just one programme for happiness, which had been declared to be scientific and therefore was as factual as gravity.

But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue—or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than wisdom. Lenin’s core of Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorized. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the CEntral Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic: people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…

Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

And in the end it all failed miserably:

The Soviet economy did not move on from coal and steel and cement to plastics and microelectronics and software design, except in a very few military applications. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930s, not with what it was doing now. It continued to suck resources and human labour in vast quantities into a heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which by now had become its own justification. Soviet industry in its last decades existed because it existed, an empire of inertia expanding ever more slowly, yet attaining the wretched distinction of absorbing more of the toal effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else in human history, before or since. Every year it produced goods that less and less corresponded to human needs, and whatever it once started producing, it tended to go on producing ad infinitum, since it possessed no effective stop signals except ruthless commands from above, and the people at the top no longer did ruthless, in the economic sphere. The control system for industry grew more and more erratic, the information flowing back to the planners grew more and more corrupt. And the activity of industry , all that human time and machine time it used up, added less and less value to the raw materials it sucked in. Maybe no value. Maybe less than none. One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted.

I don’t know if this paragraph was intentionally written to contrast with the paragraph at the top, the one about the zombie dance of capitalism. But it is certainly instructive to make such a contrast. The Soviets had originally been inspired by this fear of economics going out of control, abandoning the human beings whose lives it was supposed to improve. In capitalist countries, people existed for the sake of the economy, but under Soviet communism, the economy was going to exist only for the sake of the people.

(accidental Russian reversal: the best kind of Russian reversal!)

And instead, they ended up taking “people existing for the sake of the economy” to entirely new and tragic extremes, people being sent to the gulags or killed because they didn’t meet the targets for some product nobody wanted that was listed on a Five-Year Plan. Spoiling good raw materials for the sake of being able to tell Party bosses and the world “Look at us! We are doing Industry!” Moloch had done some weird judo move on the Soviets’ attempt to destroy him, and he had ended up stronger than ever.

The book’s greatest flaw is that it never did get into the details of the math – or even more than a few-sentence summary of the math – and so I was left confused as to whether anything else had been possible, whether Kantorovich and Glushkov really could have saved the vision of prosperity if they’d been allowed to do so. Nevertheless, the Soviets earned my sympathy and respect in a way Marx so far has not, merely by acknowledging that the problem existed and through the existence of a few good people who tried their best to solve it.

Recent article on Vox: Do Violent Video Games Actually Make People More Violent? It’s a good and even-handed article which concludes:

The short answer [is] we don’t really know. Some studies have indeed found that, in lab settings, people can become more aggressive after playing violent games. Some have also found that people who play violent games are more likely to commit violent acts in real life. But it’d be just as easy to conclude that inherently violent people are simply drawn to violent games — and indeed, several studies have come to that conclusion. Moreover, not all observational studies have found any correlation between gaming and violence. Perhaps most importantly, there’s been no surge in violence among youth over the past few decades in gaming countries to accompany the rising popularity of violent games. On the whole, the evidence is decidedly mixed.

I would, however, like to make one important point I think they left out, which also happens to be a very broad criticism of entire subfields of psychology.

They say that “lab experiments have shown violent games can increase aggression”, citing a meta-analysis of ninety-eight studies but using as their specific example a recent Italian study. In this experiment, a bunch of high-schoolers were randomly assigned to play Grand Theft Auto or some less violent game. Then they were asked to participate in an experiment where they got to blast loud noises at a partner, which seems like a pretty violent thing to do. The kids who had played Grand Theft Auto were more likely to give their partner louder, more violent blasts. A nice, elegant result very typical of results in this field.

Vox’s analysis:

There are a few caveats to keep in mind when considering these studies. One is that they use aggression and self-control as proxies for real-world violence, because researchers can’t actually allow violence to occur in a lab. The idea is that, in increasing aggressiveness, these games make it more likely that someone considering violence will be pushed over the edge and actually commit it. But there’s a huge difference between blasting someone with a loud noise, or scoring higher on a questionnaire intended to measure aggressiveness, and actually resorting to violence in the real world.

I think this is insufficiently skeptical.

Suppose I have a different hypothesis. I hypothesize that sad video games cause depression. It seems prima facie plausible. We’re having a lot of trouble with child and adolescent depression nowadays. And do you remember that thing that happened in Final Fantasy VII, with that one character (no spoilers)? Really sad. Maybe there are lots of video games like that, where you see your favorite characters or people you really like die or suffer terrible travails. In the past, maybe only a couple of people would lose people close to them, but through the vicarious experience of video games we’ve all experienced seeing our friends “die” dozens of times by the time we graduate high school. Hence, adolescent depression. Right?

We propose an experiment to test this. Fifty Italian teenagers play the appropriate scene in Final Fantasy VII; a control group of another fifty play something neutral like Tetris or whatever. Afterwards, we measure sadness in some way. For example, maybe we make them watch a comedy program and record how many times they laugh; if they don’t laugh much, we assume they’re sad. Or maybe we just give them a self-rating questionnaire. Whatever.

I predict that this study will easily find that the intervention group is sadder than the control group. I also predict that the original hypothesis, that sad video games cause depression, remains stupid.

The difference seems to be that between a temporary state of sad mood, and a long-term alteration of personality that amplifies a sadness “trait” (or more specifically depression, which sometimes presents similar to sadness but may have totally different causes). While it’s easy to imagine that sad video games affect the first, it’s much harder to believe they can do the second, and act in an additive way to make you a very sad person ten years down the line.

But the same should apply to the violence studies! Yeah, okay, you’re priming violence, you’ve got people in a high-arousal, aggressive state, they’ll probably be more violent until the effect wears off. But there’s a long way between that and saying that their personality becomes more and more violent until they shoot up a school. Especially since, as far as I know, no mass murderer is known to have played video games immediately before their crime, the period in which these kinds of effects might be relevant.

There is an old story about a drunk who loses his keys:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “This is where the light is.”

This has since been dubbed the “streetlight effect”, and these studies seem to be an example.

The policeman asks the psychologists what they’re doing. The psychologists say “Studying propensity to violence in the few minutes after someone plays a video game.” The policeman asks “And this is going to reveal important principles about why people are violent in real life?” The psychologists say “No, but it’s really easy to study.”

I want to stop for a second and say that this is not an argument that the field of videogamology is hopelessly flawed or that videogames cannot cause violence. Most of the videogamologists I have read freely acknowledge this problem. That they continue to do these kinds of studies time after time doesn’t surprise me – I’m working on a study right now for work which I don’t think will be hugely contributory to the Sum Of Human Knowledge, because I’m supposed to do something and this was a moderately interesting and do-able thing that came up. A society that rewards researchers per study, like one that rewards factories per kilogram of machinery, will get what it pays for. The videogamologists have taken this in stride and along with these sorts of laboratory studies are doing their best to do longitudinal studies adjusted for various confounders some of which reveal the same pattern. I haven’t studied the field and I have no opinion on it beyond what’s in the Vox article. I just want to make sure people don’t pay too much attention to the streetlight studies.

Which, by the way, are a problem far beyond videogamology.

Here’s an article called Arabs as terrorists: Effects of stereotypes within violent contexts on attitudes, perceptions, and affect. Participants consume some media with depictions of terrorist Arabs in it. Then they are asked what they think of Arabs. They are more likely than the control group to say they think of Arabs as terrorists. Therefore, media with stereotypical portrayals causes people to stereotype groups in various ways.

Okay. How long did the researchers give between the media in question and the survey? Five minutes? Ten? And we’re supposed to believe that this gives us important information about whether, if one of these people throws a brick at a mosque in ten years, it’s going to be because of all of the anti-Arabic media he’s been gradually consuming up until that time?

In fact, let me make a stronger claim. The “success” of this experiment actually disproves its hypothesis. Assume that everyone in both the experimental and control groups have probably seen hundreds of depictions of Arabs as terrorists throughout their lives. What the experiment finds is that one recent depiction of terrorists is enough to overwhelm all of those hundreds of past depictions, such that a clear and obvious difference shows up between the control group (who have seen hundreds of media depictions of terrorist Arabs throughout their entire lives) and the experimental group (who have seen hundreds of media depictions of terrorist Arabs throughout their entire lives, plus one extra one five minutes ago). What we’re actually finding is that any media depiction effect decays really really rapidly, so much so that people who have been told their entire lives that Arabs are terrorists can be used as the control group in an Arabs/terrorism experiment without anyone batting an eye.

Of course, it’s possible that there are two different effects – a very weak long-term effect that builds up with many exposures over time and existed in all of the study participants, and a very strong short-term effect you get when you just saw a documentary on Osama five minutes before someone asked your opinion. But in that case, you shouldn’t go proving the existence of the second effect and then pretending you’ve learned anything at all about the first.

A big chunk of the science in the area of prejudice and racism is exactly like these Arab studies, unfortunately.

Let me bring up one more area in which I think this effect distorts research.

Judith Harris’ book The Nurture Assumption makes the bold claim that most differences in how parents bring up their children don’t really change the children’s long-term outcomes that much. This obviously contradicts a wide body of research, and she goes at length into why she thinks the wide body of research is wrong.

I don’t have the book here, so I’m working from memory and it’s going to be more a general form than a specific example, but – suppose that some scientists find mothers who yell at their kids, and mothers who don’t yell at their kids, and find that the children of the yellers act out more and cause more trouble. You can conclude – and a lot of psychologists did – that yelling changes kids’ personalities and makes them more aggressive or rebellious or have some other trait desire to act out.

But other studies show that when the kids are in school, or after they’re taken away by social services, or twenty years later when they’re grown up, there’s no difference between the two groups. Why? Harris suggests that what we’re actually seeing is children responding to a dynamic. The presence of yelly parents makes kids act out, in the same way that the presence of cold makes kids put on a sweater. Cold doesn’t permanently change children’s thermoregulation and cause them to be more likely to wear a sweater twenty years later, it just causes an immediate reaction. Likewise, yelling doesn’t change children’s traits and characteristics and cause them to be more rebellious twenty years later, it just causes an immediate reaction. Remove stimulus, remove response. And this is all my vague half-remembered analogy to something I think was in the book, but I think it’s an important distinction.

Situations can cause immediate responses to those situations, or long-term changes in the way people think. You can’t just demonstrate the former and assume you’ve proven the latter.

Different groups navel-gaze in different ways. Broadway musical writers write a bunch of musicals about what it’s like to be on Broadway. Poets write a bunch of poems about writing poetry. Philosophers speculate on how philosophy may be the most truly virtuous activity. Psychoanalysts analyze the heck out of the inner mental experience of psychoanalyzing someone.

All this leaves me a little surprised that there isn’t more scientific study of nerds.

And yet there is not. Typing “nerd” into Google Scholar brings up only a series of papers on desert plants by one Dr. A. Nerd, who must have had a very unpleasant childhood. The field remains strangely unexplored.

“Nerds” seem to share a bunch of seemingly uncorrelated characteristics. They’re generally smart. They’re interested in things like math and science, especially the hard sciences like physics. They’re shy and awkward. They’re some combination of bad at getting social status and not interested in getting social status. They’re especially bad at getting other people to show romantic interest in them. They’re physically unimposing and bad at sports. They don’t get in physical fights and are very unlikely to solve problems with violence. They’re straightedge and less likely to drink or smoke to excess (according to legend, “nerd” derives from “knurd”, ie “drunk” spelled backwards). Sometimes even very specific physical characteristics make the list, like a silly-sounding high-pitched voice.

A scientific study of nerds might begin by asking: why do all of these things go together in the popular imagination, form a single category?

Of these nine classic characteristics, we can imagine people scoring either “nerdy” or “anti-nerdy” on each. If that were true, there’s only a 1/2^9 = 1/512 chance that any given person has all of these characteristics. Our null hypothesis might be that “nerd” is just a made-up category used to describe this totally coincidental group of 1/512th of the population, or those people who are sufficiently close (maybe 6 or 7 out of 9?). Could be.

The other possibility is that in fact these traits are all correlated for some reason, and people who are bad at sports really are more likely to enjoy math, less likely to drink or use violence, et cetera. “Nerd” would then be a natural category, in the same way that, for example, “bird” is a natural category pointing out that animals with feathers are more likely to have wings, beaks, et cetera rather than a totally random distribution of traits. Why would that be?

Have there been nerds across different times and cultures? The term was only coined in the mid-20th century. But Isaac Newton seems to have been a nerd. Whatever else he was, Henry Cavendish was at the very least a nerd. On the other hand, some of the Europeans I’ve talked to say that the experience of nerdiness on their side of the Atlantic is very different from the American experience, so much that it’s hard to interpret them as having a “nerd” concept at all. From my time in Japan, the experience there is different as well.

One can sort of imagine how certain of the correlated characteristics might cause others. Young people who are small and weak and bad at sports might lose social status as a result. People who are good at math might be so transfixed by the mysteries of the universe that things like sports and socializing and dating pale in comparison. People who are very smart might, for the usual neurological reasons, also have high impulse control, explaining the lack of drug use and aggression. People who are bad at social skills might not get invited to sports games and so have no opportunity to improve; they might take up unpopular but solitary pursuits like math as a result.

Or we could take the fun route and go full biodeterminist. The connection to autism and Asperger syndrome is so commonly cited (despite a lack of any real scholarly investigation) as to be cliched. Anyone familiar with the full-fledged syndrome understands it’s something very different from everyday nerdiness, but the possibility that nerdiness is some very mild form or related condition probably shouldn’t be ruled out.

Or we could go a different route. Consider:

In men (but not women) low testosterone is related to increased mathematical intelligence and increased likelihood of being gifted.

Testosterone is associated with extraversion, alone of Big Five characteristics.

Higher testosterone men have higher social status, and the cognitive role of testosterone has been described as “best understood in terms of the search for and maintenance of social status”

As anyone who has watched the controversy over steroid use in professional sports knows, testosterone improves muscle mass and athletic performance.

Men with lower testosterone have lower mating success.

High testosterone is correlated with increased drinking behavior with p < .001.

Especially in prison populations, high testosterone is closely linked to violence and aggressive behavior

Men with lower testosterone have higher-pitched voices (the media bills this as Deep Voiced Men Make Bad Mates: Study)

So at least in men, low testosterone seems to cause most of the characteristics associated with nerdhood.

But I’m being unfair. There’s a lot of counterevidence as well.

There are so many conflicting studies on testosterone and intelligence that I despair of getting anything coherent. Many studies show increased testosterone increases intelligence, especially in tasks where men generally outperform women, like spatial rotation (which tends to correlate with math) – for example, see here. I respect this research, but I would naively expect, let’s say, brilliant mathematicians to have lower testosterone than the general population, just based on my stereotypes that testosterone is associated with aggressiveness, popularity, athleticism, etc. I’m not sure how this squares with the data.

Testosterone doesn’t actually make male faces more attractive, according to Testosterone increases perceived dominance but not attractiveness in human males.

Nerds are traditionally viewed as having high libido – think watching pornography. But of course high testosterone is associated with higher libido. I don’t know if there’s a cultural thing going on where nerds have normal-to-low libido but are stereotyped as having high libido to make fun of their lack of romantic success – or even whether the pornography connection is just that nerds are better with computers. I also note with interest that testosterone is said to affect sexual libido but not desire for “sensual touch”, and a lot of people have mentioned how anomalously some of the nerd communities I’m in tend to value cuddling compared to sex relative to the general population.

I could probably find other traditionally nerdy characteristics that correlated negatively with testosterone. For example, acne is associated with higher testosterone levels.

So I don’t think this is the whole picture.

But I still feel like it should be some of the picture. Sex hormones are really complicated – for example, there seem to be different effects from in utero sex hormone exposure compared to pre-pubertal sex hormone exposure compared to pubertal sex hormone exposure, and these aren’t necessarily correlated with each other in the same people. Estrogens can have effects ranging from very similar to testosterone to exactly the opposite. Testosterone is hard to get a good measurement from, especially with the no-fuss salivary measurements I bet most of these studies used, and its effects or lack thereof would depend on lots of stuff like how much of it gets converted to dihydrotestosterone. Also, some hormones have totally different effects if they come in short spikes versus constant gradual release. So there’s a lot of room to improve our understanding of sex hormones and start distinguishing between unlike constructs.

I am reminded of an observation common among transsexuals – and brought up in Ozy’s last post – that there is a distinct cluster of transwomen who have certain very traditionally-considered-male-gendered characteristics and are very nerdy. This seems like another example of some strongly male and strongly female characteristics anomalously going hand in hand.

And what about female nerds? If we’re trying to make this about testosterone, it sounds like they need a separate explanation. Is female nerd a distinct cluster in the same way male nerd is? I don’t know. I don’t, for example, have strong feelings about whether female nerds are more or less attractive/athletic/whatever compared to non-nerdy females.

Mostly I just feel like this field is strangely under-explored. Especially when you consider what the sorts of people who explore fields are like.

Someone has been impersonating me to post racist or otherwise terrible comments on various blogs. They are using my real name, linking to my old website raikoth.net, and then saying really nasty things.

I don’t want to link to them to raise their Google visibility, but you can reverse-engineer the following (yes, I know these reveal my real name, there’s no help for it at this point):

brainsize dot wordpress dot c-o-m /2014/09/23/ masculine-guys-more-likely-to-be-republican-the-genetics-of-being-gay/comment-page-1/#comment-1590

unz dot c-o-m /gnxp/dissenting-from-american-liberalism-and-conservatism/#comment-710363

I feel like it’s most likely someone from neoreaction since they seem to know a lot of the reactionary lingo, but I’m not sure. Some SJ people were making vaguely threatening noises on Twitter recently, but I feel like they’d be more likely to stab me in the front.

This is a big problem for me. Patients will search my name to figure out what kind of a doctor they’re getting, and they’re going to come across this kind of thing. When I start trying to get jobs presumably my employers will also search my name and find this.

If the person doing this is reading this, please stop.

If anyone reading this knows the person doing this, please make them stop.

I’ve already contacted the people in charge of the associated blogs privately, but if they’re reading this, I would appreciate them deleting the offending comments and maybe getting some IPs.

I’d also appreciate any help anyone else has to offer. Has anyone else been in this position? Is there a known solution?

The best idea I can think of is to just post something here under my real name titled “If you are Googling [NAME], you will find a lot of false results” in the hope that I can make it the first result for my name and anyone searching me will notice – but that would require permanently breaking anonymity for this blog, which would sacrifice some ability to talk about controversial things. Does that sound like a good idea? A bad idea? Possibly if someone with a highly-Google-ranked blog wants to do me a favor, I can post it there instead of here? I would feel weird doing it on LW, which was the other suggestion.

The second best idea I can think of is just to switch to my real name permanently, in the hopes that SSC-related uses of my real name overwhelm other ones beyond a potential stalker’s ability to click through Google.

And while I’m on the subject – I’ve been thinking of setting up a parallel psychiatry blog, in the sense of “all of my psychiatry posts, and only my psychiatry posts, get automatically displayed on some other site along with the comments, in a way that’s hard to trace back here.” Then it would look like I have a popular psychiatry blog and I could show it to patients and employers and be like “Look! I have a psychiatry blog!” I could also put that one under my real name, which might push fake uses of my real name down the search results a little. I could pay someone a small amount of money ($100? $200?) for help making this happen.

PS: I know the formatting here has gotten a little weird recently; I’m working on it.

ADDED: Someone gave me the bright idea of retooling raikoth.net for this purpose. It is done! (As an added bonus, if I ever feel the need to actually go on profanity-laden racist rants, I have a perfect cover.)

[Content warning: TMI, polyamory.]

I.

Another one of those times three very different people writing three very different things all remind me of each other.

Ozy got very excited recently because Heartiste wrote a post attacking polyamory (Ozy reminds me that the appropriate trigger warning for Heartiste is “trigger warning: literally the worst person alive, I am so serious about this, you think I am joking but I am not”).

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but it’s still nice to know that somebody known to be generally evil takes time out of his busy day to dislike my way of life specifically. It’s like a weird sort of reverse validation.

But since the Devil sometimes speaks true, what exactly does he have to say?

Genuine, egalitarian, open polyamory for all practical purposes doesn’t exist among white Westerners. There’s always one or another party out in the asexual or anhedonic cold, nursing feelings of rejection and traumatic self-doubt. And if that party is a willing participant to his or her sexual/romantic exclusion, it’s a good bet he/she is psychologically broken, mentally unstable, physically repulsive, or suffering from clinically low sex drive. In other words, human trash.

Applying enough charity to fully fund the Red Cross for the next fifty years, Heartiste seems to be saying something along the lines of “Polyamory is especially well-suited for asexual people”. And I agree!

Many of the people I know in successful polyamorous relationships are sexual, sometimes even highly sexual. But I also know a disproportionate number of asexual polyamorous people – including myself – and the combination seems to work really, really well. Part of it is the ability for asexual people to date sexual people without having to worry about the partner having no way of satisfying their higher sex drive. Part of it is the free layer of protection against sexual jealousy. And part of it is the neat ability to sidestep most of the risks of polyamory, including infection, unintended pregnancy, and the sense of disgust that some sexual people – especially Heartiste – seem to feel at the thought of having sex with less-than-virginal partners.

For me polyamory doesn’t get into any of that. It just means lots and lots of free cuddles.

II.

Which brings me to the second thing I read recently. There is a new app out, Cuddlr, which is “like Grindr, but for cuddling”. Unequally Yoked has come out against it, saying that cuddling people without knowing them first is “objectifying”.

You already know what I think of objectification, but the criticism is unusually jarring in this instance. For me, cuddling is the opposite of objectifying. I go into social encounters viewing most people as a combination of scary and boring. I can sometimes overcome that most of the way by spending months getting to know them and appreciate their unique perspective. Or I can cuddle with them for ten minutes. Either one works.

There’s a Graham Greene quote which, being a philistine, I only know because it was included in Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal:

He took another drink of brandy. As the liquid touched his tongue he remembered his child, coming in out of the glare: the sullen unhappy knowledgeable face. He said, “Oh God, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever.” This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep; it was as if he had to watch her from the shore drown slowly because he had forgotten how to swim. He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone…

Wright’s point was that, there is this pure universal love that we wish we could feel for everyone all the time, but in practice we’re only able to feel it for our children, presumably because of evolutionary imperatives. As for me, I have no children, but the pure universal love I wish I could feel for everyone all the time, I’m only actually able to feel for cute girls I am cuddling with. It is definitely a good, correct kind of love – Leah would be more likely to call it agape or philia than eros. And this is important to me, because that kind of love is definitely an important psychological nutrient and my brain is very bad at feeling it any other way without, like, knowing somebody for ten years.

So this is the second reason why I think polyamory and (my particular variant of) asexuality go well together. It allows me to cuddle whoever I want and fall in love with whoever I want and have absurdly fond and protective feelings toward everybody if I so choose.

III.

The third thing that made me think of this was actually something I wrote in my post yesterday and realized I should expand upon:

Testosterone is said to affect sexual libido but not desire for “sensual touch”, and a lot of people have mentioned how anomalously some of the nerd communities I’m in tend to value cuddling compared to sex relative to the general population.

In the general population – let alone for people like Heartiste – men are supposed to consider cuddling to be that extremely annoying thing that women sometimes want to do instead of sex, and which they must be very careful to avoid lest women get the impression that this is acceptable.

On the other hand, in the nerdy, polyamorous communities I’ve been in, it’s been generally understood that people of all sorts, man or woman or Ozy, can like cuddling and there is no shame in it.

This has been really liberating. Like, if you ask someone if they want to have sex, they might say no, they might slap you, but at least they will understand the context: that is definitely a known thing people ask. If you ask someone to cuddle, they will usually just be very confused, which in a way makes it even creepier.

The formation of communities where it’s not creepy and you can just ask is, at least to this asexual, one of the more important pieces of social technology to come out of the weird incubator that is the Bay Area. It creates so many positive feelings and so much of the good kind of groupishness that it seems like a comical Publishers’ Clearing House-style $100 bill left on the ground in the relatively high-stakes Forming Cohesive Communities Game.

I am left speculating that it only works after you get a certain percent asexual, or a certain percent polyamorous, or a certain percent low testosterone, or a certain percent low jealousy. Or maybe that you have to have a certain amount of community cohesion before you try. Or maybe you need people with a certain amount of willingness to experiment and not take themselves seriously. I don’t know. I can certainly imagine most attempts to initiate it would implode horribly. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one who tries to import cuddle culture to some other group where social cohesion is important, like the US Senate.

It just seems to be one of those really nice equilibria that form spontaneously in certain places for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, just like the rest of civilization.