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A Broken Model of The World
The American visa rejection was delivered with the bureaucratic indifference characteristic of empire in its senescent phase. No California, no Texas, no opportunity to temporarily escape to the land of my dreams and do Rationalist Things. Instead: India. The eternal return. Air conditioning as opposed to indoor heating, and dogs who hadn't yet learned that unconditional love is a dangerous thing. I didn't intend to disabuse them.
But of course, and here's where the reptilian cortex asserts its dominion over whatever higher functions medical school was supposed to cultivate, there were women. Specifically, women who might conceivably miss me, which is to say women whose neural architecture had been sufficiently damaged by prior exposure to my personality that they'd developed something like Stockholm syndrome, except with worse texting habits. I didn't have the time to cultivate new relationships, nor was I prepared to go through the rigmarole of setting up a dating profile to local tastes. Old flames could be fanned out from the embers instead.
Near the top of this list, glowing with the phosphorescent intensity of a bad decision that knows it's bad and has made peace with this knowledge: Her. The Model. You know the one. Hot as hell, but her head is held aloft by a mixture of helium and bad decisions.
I'd dated her very briefly before fleeing to residency, that period of psychiatry training designed to teach you about antidepressants and then teach you more about which ones you've come to need (all of them). She presented, in the phenomenological sense that Heidegger might have recognized had he spent less time with Nazis and more time on dating apps*, as the eternal feminine victim: doe-eyed, helpless, perpetually buffeted by the cruel winds of toxic masculinity, which is to say every man she'd ever met, perhaps excluding me.
She'd been reaching out at semi-random intervals during my Scottish exile, something my brain's tired pattern-recognition systems had correlated with relationship turbulence, usually accompanied by marriage proposals that made me feel simultaneously desirable and like I was being offered a role in a particularly depressing regional theater production. Very ego-syntonic, as we say in the trade, which is professional code for "it made me feel good in ways I'm not too ashamed to admit."
Then: radio silence. Months of it. I'd interpreted this through my characteristically solipsistic lens as evidence that she'd found stability, or at least a nice man in the neighborhood, which turned out to be partially correct in the way that a broken clock is correct twice daily, accurate in its specifics while missing the larger horror entirely.
She had technically just reached out. Just a few days before I was due to fly in. Just a perfunctory "hey" on Insta, which I had genuinely not seen for days because, well, psychiatry doesn't make for very exciting day-in-the-life posts. At least not without trouble with the GMC.
I'd landed back in India and reached out. Nothing. I began contemplating that I was being ghosted, or that I'd outlived my usefulness to her. Maybe she had found a nice Punjabi boy to grow fat with. My daydreams were each more psychologically sophisticated than the last, which is what you do when you've spent too much time learning about defense mechanisms instead of developing functional ones.
The truth was stupider: she didn't check her DMs. She'd always been a bit shite about that. Well, self_made_human, that's the pot calling the kettle black. The solution, obvious in retrospect, required abandoning digital mediation for its older, more aggressive cousin: I called her.
Two rings. Then:
"Oh my god! You're back?"
The voice hit me like a familiar drug: breathless, pitched at a frequency that triggered some deep mammalian subroutine, laced with an enthusiasm that I knew was performed but which worked anyway because evolution has programmed male brains to be very, very stupid about certain audio frequencies. It was the auditory equivalent of those supernormal stimuli ethologists use to make birds try to mate with volleyball-sized eggs.
"I am," I said, attempting to maintain the facade of being a person with boundaries. "I thought you were ignoring me."
"No! Never! I just don't check my phone, I swear." A statement that would have been disqualifying if I were capable of learning from experience. Women and their phones are inseparable at the hip. "I missed you so much. We have to meet. Tonight? Please say tonight. I need to vent."
Reader, I am a man of medicine, of science, someone who has spent years training to make rational decisions based on evidence. I am also a man who hears a pretty woman say she needs him and immediately becomes a golden retriever who's been told there might be treats. I tell myself I'm only going out of a curdling combination of curiosity and boredom, but my tail wags nonetheless.
(The charitable explanation is that I have a genuine drive to be helpful and derive satisfaction from being nice to people. Less charitably, I crave mild amounts of drama in my life, preferably when I'm out of the immediate blast zone. The truth can be found with a Monte Carlo simulation, namely throwing darts at me.)
I arrived at her workplace, a boutique where she moonlights in sales, effectively selling insecurity to women and delusion to their husbands. Local traffic made me late, which meant I missed seeing her in her element, which was probably for the best. Some illusions should be preserved.
She drove. I rode shotgun. She was competent behind the wheel, which I noted with the mixture of surprise and guilt characteristic of men who've internalized certain stereotypes while remaining theoretically opposed to them. The other drivers, less conflicted, shouted helpful commentary about her driving that had nothing to do with driving and everything to do with living in a society that's still working through some issues around women operating heavy machinery.
It's an interesting dichotomy. Male drivers face less verbal abuse, mostly because they're a physical threat. Female drivers bring out the peanut gallery, but they're not really at much risk of having someone lay hands on them in such a public setting. But I digress:
She needed to park. I needed something to do with my hands. I bought her a soft toy from an overpriced Japanese store, that particular species of useless consumer object that somehow carries totemic significance, a material manifestation of affect that short-circuits rational gift-giving in favor of pure aesthetic stimulus. Women are suckers for these, which is a sexist observation that's nonetheless empirically correct, which is why sexism persists: it works.
After an interval calibrated to maximize anxiety without quite tipping into actual worry, she returned. She loved the gift. Then she began talking, and I realized I'd made a terrible mistake, which is to say exactly the mistake I'd intended to make.
The story was long. She'd warned me it would be long. She wasn't lying, which may have been the only thing she wasn't lying about. Or perhaps she's excessively honest with me, I seem to be a safe space, a person she can unload all her cares on without much concern. The lies were for the rest. Regardless, I took my glasses off and buried my face in my hands so many times I lost count, performing exasperation for an audience of one while that audience performed innocence for an audience of me.
The situation had evolved. The roster of suitors had expanded.
There was the Poor Nice Guy (who lives with his parents and won't move out, who I'd previously dissected with the detached interest of an entomologist pinning butterflies to cardboard). There was the Toxic Ex (who cheats), but as far as I could tell, was now out of the picture. And now, there was the Rich Guy. He's new.
The Rich Guy. Precisely as advertised. Distantly related (third cousin maybe?) far enough to avoid the genetic problems, close enough to carry social weight. He'd proposed marriage multiple times. He sounded, even to my determinedly cynical ear, like a reasonable choice. But she couldn't commit.
The reasons were familiar: he lived with his parents, lived below his means. But also (and here's where it got good) he had dogs, and her OCD couldn't handle them.
I couldn't relate. Shortly after I had landed in the country, my puppy had just destroyed my best shoes and my comfortable slippers, and my response had been mild scolding undermined by my complete inability to maintain anger at something with floppy ears. But I'm not the protagonist of this story. She is. Or maybe the dogs are.
She has OCD. She hates the dogs. She claims it's hygiene, but we know the diagnosis: Narcissism cannot tolerate a rival for attention, even if that rival licks its own ass.
I feel like an ass just saying that, I'm not The Last Psychiatrist, even if I'm more cynical than a certain Buddhist-Sufi-Lite Namebrand alternative. Don't listen to me, she does actually have OCD. Sees an actual shrink for it, not that that lady sounds like she's competent.
"He said he'd give them away," she says, pulling back to look at me with those wide, imploring eyes. "He said he'd get rid of them for me."
Pause.
This man is willing to exile two living creatures that love him unconditionally, loyal beasts that rely on him for their survival, just to secure access to her. But he won't move out of his parents' house. He is willing to sacrifice the innocent (the dogs) but unwilling to sacrifice his safety net (Mommy and Daddy). It might also have been filial piety, who knows. I had complained that Poor Guy had a stick up his ass, whereas this gentleman could use such a prosthetic as a spine.
"So let him give them away," I say.
"No," she pouts. "I can't make him do it. Then his parents will hate me. Then he'll resent me."
Then came the bombshells, delivered with the casualness of someone ordering coffee. One, she was still seeing Poor Guy. Two, she wanted me to commit fraud.
She'd convinced herself that the solution was a forged medical document stating she was deathly allergic to dogs. She'd already tried this gambit with Rich Guy, but he'd pointed out (with admirable attention to empirical reality) that she'd played with his dogs before without issue. Now she wanted me, as a doctor, to make it official.
"Write me a note," she says. "Say I have a severe allergy. If it's medical, he has to get rid of them, and it's not my fault. It's doctor's orders."
She wants the result (no dogs) without the cost (guilt). She wants to outsource the moral culpability to me.
I have many moral failings. They are numerous and well-documented. But I enjoy having an unblemished record and no medical board investigations, so I declined, explaining this in terms I hoped were clear even to someone whose relationship to truth was essentially fictional.
She escalated. She offered sex.
"Come on," she says, pressing against me. "I'll make it worth your while."
Let me pause here to note the cosmically insulting nature of this offer. Sex as payment for fraud. Sex as the universal solvent for moral reasoning. Sex offered with the bland confidence of someone who's learned that it usually works, which is the most damning indictment of men as a category that I can conceive.
Been there, done that, I told her. Which was true. Which made me complicit. Which made this whole scene a kind of recursive nightmare where everyone's crimes implicated everyone else's.
She changed tactics: Would I help her decide between Rich Guy and Poor Guy?
Finally, a question I could answer. My reply was nigh instant, the answer was obvious.
"Go for Rich Guy," I said. "He's sensible. It's better to be with someone who loves you, than someone you love (if you can't have both). And I know you. You couldn't adjust to a lower standard of living if your life depended on it."
She blinked. "But won't Poor Guy become rich when he marries me? He could take over what my dad built!"
I sighed the sigh of a man who's realized he's explaining addition to someone who's still working on number permanence. "That's your own money, returned to you. If you marry into wealth, you have twice the money. Use that pretty head. Think."
Her face scrunched up in an adorable display of revelation. She told me that she'd never considered this. Twice the money sounded good. Almost twice as good, accounting for diminishing marginal utility. The fact that she was treating marriage as a financial instrument while simultaneously maintaining that she wanted true love, this contradiction didn't seem to register. Cognitive dissonance requires cognition.
But wait: Poor Guy worked in her dad's field. Rich Guy was adjacent: leather tanning, not textiles. Who'd run the family business?
I suggested that maybe Rich Guy could learn. She seemed unconvinced. I offered to make a SWOT analysis, because apparently I'd become the kind of person who does strategic planning for other people's romantic clusterfucks.
I reached for my phone and its rarely used stylus. "Let's be logical. Let's do a SWOT analysis."
Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats.
I started drawing the grid. I was outlining why the Rich Guy was the strategic play. Strengths: Money, Devotion. Threats: The Dogs.
"See?" I said. "The Rich Guy is the move. You just have to deal with the dogs."
"I made a list too!" she chirped.
She pulled out her iPhone and shoved the Notes app in my face. (Why do women love Apple's default apps? This is a genuine mystery to me, impenetrable as quantum mechanics.) "Great minds think alike!"
Fools seldom differ.
I looked at her list. It was a chaotic mess of emojis and bullet points. Rich Guy and Poor Guy were neck and neck.
But there, buried in the text, was a note she had clearly forgotten was there:
Still sleeping with [Poor Guy]. [Rich Guy] doesn't know, haven't slept with him yet.
She was showing me the evidence of her own infidelity. She was handing me the smoking gun. And she didn't even realize it. She was scrolling past it, pointing out that the Rich Guy buys nice purses, completely oblivious to the fact that she had documented her own moral bankruptcy.
I looked at her. "Are you fucking insane? What if Rich Guy finds out about Poor Guy??"
She startled. "When did I tell you their names?"
I pointed at her phone. The blush that overtook her face was the color of shame, or possibly arousal, or possibly both, because at this level of dysfunction all emotions blend into an undifferentiated psychic sludge.
I laughed. It was absurd.
"What?" she asked, smiling blankly.
"You're amazing," I said. "You're really something."
I grabbed her hand. I deployed a metaphor about masturbation and bushes that I'm not proud of but which seemed apt.
"So you'll write the note?" she asked. "You're a liberal guy. You understand. You should just marry me."
"Liberal."
She uses that word like a get-out-of-jail-free card. To her, "liberal" doesn't mean "politically left-leaning." It means "permissive." It means "you are too smart to have boundaries." She thinks that because I listen to her stories without vomiting, I approve of them. Maybe I've internalized too much, it's worth reminding myself that in my personal life, I can just get up and walk away. I've done that before, with her, when she'd called me out on a date and then broke down into tears and asked me to drive her to her ex’s place.
"How long are you staying in Scotland?" she said. "Why won't you just marry me? Things would be so much simpler!"
Previously, this plea had made me feel significant, wanted, like Captain Save-a-Ho riding in on a white horse. Now I felt something closer to disgust. Not an immense amount of disgust, I've long since abandoned the pretense that I hold all the moral high ground. Mostly the aesthetic disgust of watching someone dig their own grave with manicured nails until those nails chip and bleed, and then mild, incipient rage at the idea that she saw me that way, as a convenient solution to all her problems. The kind, thoughtful doctor who actually listened, didn't judge too much (to her face, an anonymous audience is different, or so I say). I was her idea of a BATNA, a man without an ego, willing to tolerate stodgy in-laws, the kind who wouldn't tell his wife to stop dressing like such a slut the moment the marriage pyre went cold.
The safe choice. I resented this, I do have an ego. I do have standards, even if I'm too polite to throw that in someone's face when they presume that they meet them.
But disgust and rage are just other forms of engagement, and I was too deep in this to extract myself cleanly.
So I tried reverse psychology.
It was then, that I played the card I'd kept up my sleeve for exactly this moment.
I told her I'd come around to marriage. (True.) That I could be convinced to marry her. (Highly Debatable.) She demanded to know when I'd be back permanently.
Two years minimum, I said. Probably more. She deflated immediately. Too long.
So I flipped it: "Come to Scotland," I said.
I said it with the gravitas of a romantic lead in a period drama. Leave this all behind. Come with me. That wasn't a lie, technically. A proposition can't be false. But I said it with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how she'd respond.
I only said it because I knew with 100% certainty she would decline.
It was a zero-risk bet. She has her "career" here, her parents, her tangled web of dysfunction. She wasn't going to Glasgow. But by offering, I get to be the Savior. I get to be the "One That Got Away." I get the credit for the gesture without having to buy the extra plane ticket.
She blanched. Scotland? Doing her own laundry? Cooking? Cleaning? Not cool. She'd grown up wealthy. She told me she couldn't adjust. She didn't seem to be the least bit ashamed of this.
"I can't," she sighed, exactly as predicted. "It's too complicated."
"I know."
I pointed out that I'd grown up similarly and adjusted fine. That First World life wasn't so bad. I explained that even my salary was enough to allow for a decent existence for a young couple. The more I pushed, the more she retreated, exactly as predicted.
Excellent. My model of human nature, or at least her particular neural architecture, remained accurate. I'd convinced her that I wasn't an option by making her convince herself. The lies you tell yourself stick harder than the lies others tell you. So does the truth. Nothing I'd said was a lie, after all. This is why advertising works. This is why democracy fails.
"Will you wait until you're back to marry me?" she asked.
I laughed. "You won't wait two years."
"You're right," she admitted.
Throughout this conversation, she kept flinching, looking out the windows (but hadn't asked me to remove the arm I had around her, or the other on her thigh). I asked why. She said she was worried one of the men might be in the neighborhood. It was midnight. They lived elsewhere. I pointed this out.
"Wait! I can check." She opened WhatsApp. Rich Guy, it turned out, was insecure and demanded she share her live location constantly. Every few minutes, down to the meter. No wonder she'd chosen this café, it was close enough to home to explain, far enough from anywhere else to avoid detection. A prisoner's exercise yard.
To his credit (which is very little), he reciprocated by sharing his own location. The panopticon didn't have a one-way mirror.
She messaged him asking him his plans. His reply was terse but quick. Business meeting, too tired to visit, going to bed. Her paranoia subsided.
Then came the detail that broke me: he'd offered to get rid of the dogs. Kicking out his elderly parents? A step too far.
Where did she find these people? My dog had destroyed my shoes and I'd merely scolded him. This man was willing to dispose of two loyal animals for a woman who felt nothing for him.
Psychiatry teaches phenomenology, empathy, understanding. It never quite conveys that some people are mentally alien. If I had to choose between a woman and my dogs, I know which bitch I'd be showing the door. Both my dogs are male.
More conversation. More coffee. Then beer, she told me they secretly sold it, just hid the menu to maintain a veneer of family-friendliness, which felt like a metaphor for something but I was too tired to figure out what.
She looked exhausted. Grey hairs emerging. Still gushing about her nephew, the Indo-Italian baby who'd break hearts someday. So much for feminine solidarity.
More terrible ideas sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Could I present as her psychiatrist and talk to Rich Guy? I said I'd talk to him in a personal capacity only, mostly from morbid curiosity about the kind of men she attracted. Maybe I'm trying to understand myself.
"Why can't I be happy?" she asked.
"Because," I said, with clinical detachment, "you are a dumb bitch."
I didn't say it with anger, even if I felt it. I said it with the flat affect of a clinician delivering a terminal diagnosis. It was cruel. Very uncharacteristically so for me, I still feel bad about it, but she'd pushed me to breaking point. It was also a diagnosis. She teared up.
"You're mean!" she sobbed. "I'm trying so hard! Why are you calling me names?"
No she didn't. That would have been easy, given me the option to stonewall in the face of bluster and crocodile salt-trails. Instead:
She stayed quiet, head lowered, hair cascading down to hide her tears. This made it much harder, she was self-aware enough to know of her flaws. I decided to relent, and attempt an explanation.
I explained that her misery was entirely self-manufactured, a boutique artisan suffering. "You are crying because you don't like the mirror," I told her. "Look at what you're doing. You have a guy who wants to marry you. He is rich. He loves you. He is willing to give up his dogs for you. And it's not enough."
"It's not perfect!" she wailed.
"That's your problem," I said. "In the search for perfection, you are turning down 'good enough.' You are creating chaos because you are terrified of settling. You cheat on the Rich Guy with the Poor Guy, you cheat on the Poor Guy with the Rich Guy, and you try to cheat on both of them with me. You are miserable because you refuse to make a choice."
She looked at me, mascara running, eyes wide.
"But I just want to be happy," she whispered.
No, she doesn't.
She wants to be admired. Happiness requires compromise. Happiness requires you to live in a house with a mother-in-law or a dog you don't like. Happiness is tolerating unhappiness today in the hopes it'll pay interest tomorrow. Happiness is boring.
She doesn't want boring. She wants the drama. She wants the crisis. She wants to be on a couch begging a doctor to commit fraud so she doesn't have to feel bad about making a man kill his dogs.
I told her the juggling act would end, the plates would smash, and I would not be there to sweep up the shards.
She didn't disagree.
Eventually it was late. I was out of useful things to say. "Go back to the Rich Guy," I said, standing up. "Marry him. Make him give up the dogs. See how that feels."
"You think I should?"
"I think you deserve each other," I said.
He is a coward who betrays his loyalty to his pets. She is a narcissist who betrays her loyalty to her partners. They are a match made in hell, and they will be perfectly miserable together in a very nice house, once the parents and the dogs die of old age.
She kissed me goodbye, carried off that kawaii rabbit with a spring in her step, turned the corner to her gated compound. I gave in to impulse and bought a cigarette.
I didn't smoke it.
The visa was declined. My winter in California is gone. But as I stepped out into the humid Indian night, I realized I didn't need the Pacific Coast Highway.
Here's what I think: everyone in this story should kill themselves. Except the dogs. I'll include myself if they get a pass.
The dogs are the only innocents. The rest of us are complicit in whatever this is, this performance of intimacy masquerading as intimacy, this simulation of care that exists primarily to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves and each other. We're all playing roles in a production that should have closed years ago, but we keep showing up because what else are we going to do? Be alone? Be honest?
I get roped into this shit because I'm bored. I relate to the claim that the worst thing a man can be is useless. Perhaps I am minimally complicit, as it goes, but my hands are hardly clean. They probably still smell of her perfume.
Better to keep performing. Better to keep pretending that our patterns aren't patterns, that our compulsions aren't compulsions, that our inevitable trajectories toward mutual destruction aren't already written in every decision we've made since we were old enough to know better.
The dogs, at least, love honestly. They destroy things because they don't know better, not because they're trying to avoid knowing better. There's something almost sacred in that.
As for the rest of us? We're just apes with pretensions and smartphones, little devices marketed as capturing accurate snapshots of reality, and then layers upon layers of tooling and filters to turn reality into something more Insta-worthy. Some of us are stumbling through the dark, convincing ourselves that the lies we tell ourselves are somehow more sophisticated than the lies others tell us.
The standard literary thing to do would be to protest that they're not, that all lies and sins are made equal. I'm not so far gone as to believe that. No, I think I've put in a reasonable amount of effort into giving her the best advice I could. She never listens, but isn't patient autonomy all the rage?
The head is a hot air balloon.
But remember: the balloon only looks like it's flying. It's really just at the mercy of the wind.
Stop blowing.
*Confession: I haven't read Heidegger, unless a Wikipedia summary counts. I both refuse to read Continental Philosophy on principle and happen to be new to the whole pretentious navel-gazing literary style, please bear with while I calibrate the signal.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Particular thanks/congratulations this month to @Rov_Scam, who double-tapped two weeks and the Main Motte category this month, carrying nearly 20% of the total report. Some of you may recall that one of the ways I whittle down the list is, if you have multiple QC nominations in a single month, each comment included in the final report weighs against including an additional comment in the report. Nevertheless, the primary driver of the AAQC report is community feedback, and of the dozen or so comments @Rov_Scam had nominated, every comment included here was in the top ten posts of the month.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of October 27, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 3, 2025
@clo:
Contributions for the week of November 10, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 17, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 24, 2025
- "So I finally finished The Years of Rice and Salt by KSR by recommendation of @self_made_human and my 15-year-old self."
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I decided to post it here because it got long, and also because I use either real-world identity or a very transparent one on the book review sites. Unfortunately, we are now living in the times when people are getting murdered for saying unpopular things, domestic terrorists openly put bounties on people, and I see a significant part of the industry this book concerns and I belong to being completely fine with that - of course as long as "bad people" are getting hurt. I suspect many of them might classify me as "bad people". I don't really expect my stupid book review to really be seen by enough crazies for anything to happen, but there's no reason to take the additional risk. Pseudonymous publication is safer. I could also not publish it at all, but if I already bothered to write it, I might as well let others read it.
I am not sure how to describe this book. On one hand, it is a fascinating account of what happened in Facebook from a person who was right in the middle (or rather at the top, as the global public policy director, working directly with the CEO and COO) of it and is certainly worth reading if you want to be educated on what was/is going on (it ends in 2017 when the author had been fired). On the other hand, the sheer blindness of the author to her own role in the events and her limits is impressive. Facebook is now trying to retaliate against Sarah Wynn-Williams (that's the author) for violating various NDAs, which she most likely did, but given their response to it is so far "we don't do that anymore", one could infer at least some of the juicy stuff is actually true. The trick would be to know which parts. All of it, some of it, a little of it? One of her coworkers says "definitely not all of it". Others agree. Wynn-Williams herself in the interview to Business Insider declared that the question of factual accuracy is not the one that matters and witnesses contradicting her claims are "a distraction". Which in my book means "some of it" is the best we are getting.
To get it out of the way, the cases of workplace harassment she describes are horrible. I do not know how accurate the descriptions are - we heard only one side there, so I can not assess any aspect of the veracity of the claims - but if they describe real events at least to some degree, it is absolutely unacceptable and should not have happened to anybody. I was a bit put off by the cavalier attitude with which she approached the Kavanaugh affair in the epilogue, treating the fact the somebody could even stand besides Kavanaugh during the hearing as the ultimate sign of moral degradation (surely everybody knew the verdict before hearing any testimonies, and it was supposed to be just mere formality?). Thus I suspect the matters aren't so black and white and she is not the most reliable narrator. But even with that, what she described per se is totally horrible. That's all I have to say about that.
Moving on to the other parts of the book: if we look at what had been happening, the author literally inserted herself as the main person to drive and shape Facebook's international growth and engagement with top international politicians. If introducing 21st century informational technology into societies that aren't ready for it is dangerous and prone to disasters, she is the person who enabled, engineered and performed the deed. Probably because she was sure with her at the top, it will be alright (spoiler: it wasn't). And it's not some random "caught in the flow" thing - she literally came to Facebook to do just that, and she did. Pretty successfully, given the amount of praise she received from M.Z. and his subordinates. The essence of her complaint is that she did not have enough power to do it exactly like she wanted, and that's why it often turned out wrong. If only she were an all-powerful dictator (or at least, if all the power were given to people who think exactly like her) everything would have been much better. That was her conclusion at the end - wrong people were censored, wrong people were not censored, an all that because they didn't listen to her.
The parts where she describes how she stayed for a long time in Facebook because she otherwise wouldn't have healthcare are quite hard to believe. First of all, there's COBRA, and she is married, and there are ways to buy health insurance without being employed by Facebook. Sure, it's expensive, but I have trouble believing a person who was at the top of Facebook since such early days and speaking to people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg all the time didn't have at least some money going to them. Surely, maybe not fabulously rich like M.Z. himself, but at least solid middle-class level? Even if she were hopelessly naive and saintly unbothered by money concerns, she could not find an hour during all these years to talk to a lawyer and a financial advisor who would explain here how to navigate such things? In Silicon Valley, where these matters are discussed in every second coffee table at every second coffee shop? And being on the top of FB, literally rubbing shoulders with heads of state and personally engaging their closest teams, and having NZ Embassy and Oxfam on her resume too, she had absolutely no prospect of other employment whatsoever, besides Facebook? Utterly unbelievable. What is entirely believable though is that the author found it hard to give up all that shmoozing with heads of states and fixing the world for the rest of us, and trade it for some boring office job where you don't even have a chance to see Xi Jinping once, and don't get to laugh about how insignificant the president of Guatemala is.
Complete lack of reflection and realization of author's own biases permeates the whole book. A lot of the second half is dedicated to the death of the democracy in the US, also known to some as the (first) election of Donald J. Trump. Of course, half of the country voted for him, but what to that? They were sure a bunch of evil people, or fools misled by evil people, and never would win any elections if not for their dirty tricks. The fact that the Clinton win had to be a prescribed, normal way of events is ingrained so deep that the latter campaign is never really mentioned in the book, maybe hardly once. All the evil tricks Trump campaign supposedly played with Facebook are described in detail, but how Clinton campaign used social media at all? And if they did not - why? What were they doing all that time? Why nobody from the right thinking people in Facebook reached out for them if they for some weird turn of events forgot about social media, despite the fact that Obama campaign used the social media very actively and had been publicly on record bragging about it?
These questions are not even asked, never mind answered, because these question only matter if there were a competition between two equal teams. The author never admits the thought. There is the normal turn of events - Democrats win, the power is in the hands of The Experts (TM), people vote for whoever they are told to and behave how they are told to behave, for their own good - and when it happens, there's nothing to discuss, it is as it always should be. Well, maybe let's talk about how to make it even better. Only the departures from the normal events - like people voting for the wrong candidate, clearly because they were deceived and are too stupid to realize that - deserve discussion. And to think there actually were evil people - including inside Facebook! - who thought it was a good thing! They actually talked about some policies they might like, something Trump may do that would be good - as if the Coming of The Antichrist is some kind of normal political event! Imagine the gall, the sheer audacity of not recognizing the suffering of all the right thinking people and not subjugating their own views to the demands of the moment! How do such people even exist? If one were religious, that would be a good moment for the protagonist to have a crisis of faith - but fortunately there's nothing like that in that universe.
This is the quality that is present in the whole text, every discussion of every question concerning any policy or decision. The author never argues for a certain outcome, as one would have in a debate, never presents any deliberate reasoning or substantiation. To do that would be to recognize there could exist multiple opinions on the matter, and people with wrong opinion may need to be convinced by way of logic and reason. That's not how it works, not in this book. There is a normal, obvious, correct and proper opinion or decision, and every normal, proper and decent person already knows it. It does not need to be argued or proven. It does not even need to be pointed out - like if you notice a baby around, you don't need to be told "don't eat the baby!" - you already know the babies are not to be eaten. So the author just describes her own shock and horror at realizing that people in front of her are monsters - if they do not actually follow the proper way. Rarely it goes beyond that - and almost never to actually have a proper argument. Because what's the point arguing with monsters anyway? How would you convince a person who wants to eat a baby that it is not good, and why you are talking to such a person at all?! This is how this book handles most of the controversies.
What the book described about Zuckerberg changed my opinion about him a bit. It looks like he indeed had been the autistic startup techie who just wanted the product to grow, and initially had no interest in wielding the emerging power for anything but improving the service. He seems to indeed have had that libertarian streak in him that many other tech founders had and lost (he lost it too, of course). Wynn-Williams and others successfully convinced him he has to play with world powers, and become a world power himself. That of course would change any person. But looks like the most of the problems with freedom of speech at FB originate from the likes of Wynn-Williams (quelle surprise!) rather than from M.Z. himself, at least initially. That said, as a corporation FB exhibited the typical psychopathic approach most of major corporations now exhibit - be woke on the outside, do anything to expand and profit on the inside, including making deals with most horrible individuals and regimes, if it pushes up the numbers, all while proclaiming high-minded ideals. This part of the book is one that is the most believable because I can observe it from the outside, both in FB and in many other companies. The company as a whole and top persons in particular are all colossal hypocrites - that part I totally believe. That, of course, does not exclude the director of global public policy too.
The author proclaims in multiple places that all the wrongs and evils Facebook did could actually have been avoided, if only. But the "if only" part is regrettably shallow. The author hints she knows what is the right thing to do, and possesses the recipes for fixing of all modern ails of social media - from teen addiction to genocide in Myanmar - but she never actually tells us, what exactly should have been done, and why she thinks it would have worked. It's not that her argument is bad - but here again, she doesn't even see the need to make a proper argument, mere proclamation "you should have done it differently!" is enough. It may be acceptable from a random layperson, but not from somebody who had been the top policy maker for Facebook and is actually writing a book about it! If you say it had to be made different, spend some time on proper argument of how and why it's better! If you think it'd make the book too long, you can drop some episodes like you being bitten by wasps or such, I am sure it was a profound experience for you but I am equally sure the reader could survive without it.
So, is this book worth reading? It was for me. I am by nature and nurture a skeptical reader, and an unreliable narrator is not something I am afraid of, if there's substance to chew on. This book has the substance. It would be a good book if it didn't also have the numerous flaws I described above, but such as it is - I end up with the same I started with - I do not know how to describe it, even though I do not regret having read it.
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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Hello everyone. So, as the title would suggest I have recently been prescribed Zepbound for weight loss. I won't go too far into my long history of struggling with my weight as an adult, but suffice it to say I have been fat for basically my whole life. High school, fat. College, fat. After college, lost some weight, gained it all back, and wouldn't you know it, as a young professional, fat. You can therefore hopefully imagine my excitement and hope when I heard about these things called GLP-1s, and how they were something of a miracle drug for weight loss. Sure there were a bunch of other neat effects that some papers started reporting on, but frankly I did not, and do not, give a shit. I thought that the Motte might get a bit of enjoyment out of reading a weekly post about how Zepbound is effecting me. Call it a case study, though it'll probably be more of a blog. My current plan is to post on Fridays, injection day, and take notes throughout the week. Ideally. We'll see how that goes. At some point I'll probably switch to one post a month, simply because I'll be on a full-scale dose and the week-to-week changes will likely be minimal. Per the manufacturer's instructions, I'll be rotating the injection site weekly, and I'll include that in the biodata section below for your consumption, though frankly I don't know if I have the guts (hah) to inject into my stomach. I might just alternate thighs. If you have questions, comments, concerns, criticisms, whatever, let me know. If these do well or if there is clearly an appetite (hah) for more, I'll keep posting. If the obvious vibe is "shut up fatty nobody cares" then I won't. Please do say so if there's something you think I'm leaving out that I'd like to mention.
Bio-data
Sex: Male
Age: 29
Height: 71.25"*
Starting Weight: 278.0lbs**
Current Weight: 273.5lbs
Goal Weight: 200lbs***
Starting BMI: 38.8
Starting Dose: 2.5mg
Current Dose: 2.5mg
Injection Site: Right Thigh
* Yes I lie on dating apps and say I'm 6'.
** At my weight, daily fluctuations in the 2-3lb range are pretty standard. But 278.0 is what the scale said on Day 1, so that's what I'm going with.
*** Technically still in the middle of the "overweight" BMI range, but the idea of being 200lbs is as foreign to me as the idea of being thin. So we start with a nice round number, and see how it goes from there.
Day One
Notes: I'm incredibly excited about starting. I get off work, drive directly to the pharmacy, and pick up my prescription. Fortunately (well, ish) because I am a Level 3 Fat (Obese Class II) insurance covered it, and Eli Lilly has a manufacturer's coupon, which together brings the cost down from the extortionate $1500 a month to an affordable $25 a month. I get home, and pretty much immediately pop open the container, read the instructions, and inject the first pen. It stings a little, though honestly it's not as painful as I'd feared.
Effects: None noted
Day Two
Notes: I notice that I'm simply less hungry throughout the day. I know that the 2.5mg dose is not really supposed to have that much of an effect, it's mostly to get your body adjusted to the drug so that when you ramp up to the real effective dosages (5mg-15mg), you're less likely to suffer adverse effects like nausea and diarrhea. So I'm wondering if this is placebo effect, but I'm not going to question it. Less hungry = eating less food = less calories = weight loss. Placebo effect or drug, as long as the number on the scale goes down I'm happy.
Effects: Appetite suppression
Day Three
Notes: I again note that I'm less hungry throughout the day, and realize I probably should start actively logging my food intake, both for calorie counting purposes and to see if I actually do trend down in terms of consumption. I resolve to start this. Today I ate one 8" sandwich (lunch and quasi-dinner), 8oz of potato salad (lunch), one almond croissant (evening), and one hot chocolate (evening). I've added the approximate caloric intake to each day's log. I was planning on eating the entire sandwich for lunch, but felt absolutely stuffed after only eating half. I saved the other half for a few hours later, and ate it then. Around 7pm I felt moderately hungry but not that hungry. Out of what I now think was pure habit I went out and got something to eat, the aforementioned croissant and hot chocolate. After consuming both I feel grossly overfed, and a bit nauseous. Was it too much food? Or was it the processed sugars? Is this what a normal person eats in a day? I try to temper my expectations and keep from getting too hopeful too fast, but I can't remember the last time I've eaten this little in a day.
Effects: Appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety, nausea(?).
Caloric Intake: 1850 calories.
Day Four
Notes: First day back at work since I started. I read that most people experience side-effects 1-2 days after the injection, so I made sure to do it on Friday hoping any issues would crop up over the weekend, not while I'm at work. If my company ever needed to worry about my loyalty, the fact that the insurance I'm getting from them covers Zepbound should reassure them mightily. I noticed lowered appetite suppression today, but still increased feelings of satiety. I wanted to eat more, but I felt absolutely stuffed after eating about 2/3rds of my lunch (rice, sweet potato, beef). Perhaps most importantly, I was able to actually stop eating when I felt full. This is something I've struggled with my whole life. If there is food in front of me, I want to eat it, and I rarely felt full before finishing everything in front of me. This is two days in a row when I have felt completely full before finishing my food, and actually been able to stop eating. It sounds dumb, but this actually is a serious behavioral change. Dinner was a bowl of cereal.
Effects: Lowered appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 1800 calories.
Day Five
Notes: Continued downward trend of appetite suppression today, but a similar "eyes bigger than stomach" effect vis-a-vis increased satiety. I had a chicken sandwich and fries for lunch, and while I ate the chicken breast, the pickle, the tomato, and the fries, I left about 2/3rds of the bun un-eaten. I finished eating lunch around 12:30pm, by 5pm I still felt full. Not my usual level of full where I think "oh I could probably eat something if I wanted to, but I just don't really want to" but "if I eat anything larger than an apple I am going to hurl it right back up." Not quite nausea, I didn't want to throw up, but certainly uncomfortably full. I think getting used to this increased satiety is going to take me a little while. I'm going to try making a conscious effort to slow down my pace of eating, in hopes of noticing I'm full before I actually feel full. While this isn't quite nausea, it's certainly not that pleasant either.
Effects: Lowered appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 1500 calories.
Day Six
Notes: No appetite suppression at all today, I was angrily eyeing the clock by 10 wondering when I could reasonably eat my lunch, and I was already hungry when I got home. That said, I still ended up eating my lunch in two parts (half at noon, half at 2pm). So still some increased feeling of satiety, just not to the same effect as yesterday or Monday. Not surprising in the least, lowest dose of the medicine and the first week of taking it, honestly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Overall I'm very pleased with the effects so far, I just wish they'd lasted longer but I'm sure that'll happen either next week or when I step up to the 5mg dose.
Effects: Less feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 2000 calories.
Day Seven
Notes: Nether appetite suppression nor increased feelings of satiety today. Still, I was able to maintain some good habits, like slowly eating my relatively healthy (fish & rice) lunch. I'm assuming I'll more-or-less revert to form tomorrow, but overall this has been a very successful first week.
Effects: None
Caloric Intake: 2000 calories.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.