Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Transnational Thursday for May 14, 2026

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Wellness Wednesday for May 13, 2026

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Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

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This installment rounds out a loose trilogy discussing gentrification. In the first installment of the trilogy, we looked at the factors that unexpectedly made Lawrenceville the trendiest neighborhood in the city. In the last installment, we looked at how those factors applied to three nearby neighborhoods that have seen gentrification to some degree, along with the additional factor of there being a spillover effect. In this installment, we will look at East Liberty, a large neighborhood to the east that epitomizes a much different kind of gentrification, one that is not the result of natural demographic change but of deliberate planning. In terms of an urbanist narrative, this is the quintessential city neighborhood, not just for Pittsburgh but for the whole country, as its history runs the entire gamut of urbanist talking points: Rise, halcyon, stagnation, urban renewal, white flight, ghettoization, gentrification, and, finally, NIMBYism.

Series Index:

13. East Liberty: Gentrification Defined

East Liberty is located directly to the east of Friendship and Garfield, which thus makes it the easternmost neighborhood we have discussed thus far. Its western boundaries with those neighborhoods are Negley Ave. and Black St., and the northern boundary with Highland Park is at Stanton Ave. I generally prefer not to draw boundary lines down streets where each side is in a different neighborhood, but it makes sense to do so here. Negley is a busy thoroughfare without a cohesive business district and feels like a dividing line. Stanton is a little mushier, but the northern boundary is mushy to begin with and moving it elsewhere would make even less sense. Black is the only controversial one, as I put that entirely within Garfield last time, and will keep it there, though the argument can be made that it's in East Liberty.

The other boundaries are more controversial in the sense that they differ from the official boundaries. The southern limit is officially at Center Ave., but the ravine that holds the busway is a more natural dividing line and the one people tend to use colloquially. At least until it crosses Penn Ave., at which point Penn becomes, for the most part, the southern boundary. Here in the southeastern corner I am including the entirety of Bakery Square and the associated development that, while technically split between Larimer and Shadyside is almost always described as being in East Liberty. That exception aside, East Liberty Blvd., a wide, four-lane road, and the Negley Run Valley form the eastern boundary.

13A. Pittsburgh's First Exurb

The Upper Ohio Valley was of such importance to the English of the 18th century that control of it was the catalyst for the first global war in world history. The advantages were clear, as its waterways would provide cheap, easy access to the interior of the continent, from Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico. The disadvantage was that 300 miles and a wall of mountains stood between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the situation wasn't much better with respect to Baltimore. Accessing the raw materials of the interior was easy, but accessing East Coast markets meant paying exorbitant rates to have goods shipped on rough, dangerous roads. When Pittsburgh was founded, the only improved path east was the old Braddock Road, which was improved when going through towns but in remote areas was nothing more than a path through the woods. The earliest solution was an improved turnpike, the Pittsburgh and Harrisburgh Pike, known locally as the Greensburg Pike, which survives today as Penn Ave. in Pittsburgh and as US 30 for much of the distance between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

I don't want to dwell too much on etymology, but once again, I've run into a folk etymology that just won't die. Most popular histories state that the area is called East Liberty because "liberties" was an older word referring to free grazing areas on the outskirts of cities. I had no reason to question this until I started researching the area's history and discovered that East Liberty is actually one of the older outlying neighborhoods. It seems highly unlikely that people in Pittsburgh would have driven their animals several miles out of town to graze. Sure enough, I can't find any evidence that any of this land was used in that way, and I can't find any old dictionaries that define "liberties" as such; indeed, I can't find any reference to that usage whatsoever. Liberties were a generic name for freely awarded land grants in Pennsylvania. Some of these had been given out by William Penn at the colony's founding, but land in the West was frequently given as compensation to Revolutionary War veterans.

The land was originally owned by Alexander Negley, who settled in the area at the time of the Revolution. His son, Jacob, laid out a town just to the south of the family farm, which was initially known as Negleystown but was alternately known as East Liberty early on and was almost exclusively known as such by the 1840s. Jacob Negley's daughter, Sarah, would marry one Thomas Mellon, who learned early that if one is to marry it's just as easy to marry rich as to marry poor. While inheriting a fortune may be the old-fashioned way to make it, Mellon realized that you don't have to be that lucky. Anyway, Negley was proud of the small village he had founded, and when the pike came through town in 1818, he made sure that it was paved to double width.

It should be noted that, at this time, East Liberty was not a suburb or even an exurb of Pittsburgh. Per Google Maps, East Liberty is about an hour and 45-minute walk from Downtown. In an age when the horse represents the fastest mode of transportation and one's own motive power the preferred mode for most everyday activities, it was too far away to have much influence. Instead, it existed to serve the farms in the area, as well as travelers on the pike. With the arrival of the railroad in 1852, however, transit time to town would be cut to 20 minutes, and annual passes were available for frequent riders. It wasn't long before Pittsburgh's wealthy began fleeing the crime, smoke, and mud of Downtown for the bucolic charm of the East End. Even the lower classes would get a bit of a reprieve, as the rich required servants, and the growing town would need ancillary businesses. This trend only accelerated as the 19th century wore on and electric streetcars were introduced. Located far from the smoke and squalor of Downtown and industry, with cattle being driven up Amberson Ave. as late as the 1890s, East Liberty became a prestige address, and the entire East End became the refuge of the well to do.

The area comprising present-day East Liberty was not the most desirable, as its smaller houses and denser construction were meant for the working to middle class employees of the ancillary businesses, but, with its 100-foot wide main street, it was well positioned to become the commercial heart of the entire East End. By its peak in the 1920s, East Liberty had become Pittsburgh's second Downtown, home not to just businesses, but upscale businesses. The higher-end neighborhoods nearby had their own small business districts and scattered storefronts, but East Liberty was a destination. To map the idea onto the modern conception of suburban America, it would have had the same focus as a suburban mall and the surrounding businesses. There may be other commercial areas nearby, but they serve a more local population, and don't have the big box retailers that need a large catchment area.

East Liberty's peak was simultaneously long and brief. It was the premiere commercial district in the East End for nearly 100 years, but the first several decades it was simply in a state of growth, as the greater East End grew up along with it. By the time it had solidified into an urban neighborhood, the writing was already on the wall. As the 20th century was getting underway, the Gilded Age was coming to a close. Deteriorating class relations and increased Federal spending influenced the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, dealing a blow to the upper classes. Meanwhile, the early industrialists who had turned Pittsburgh into an economic powerhouse were slowly dying off. The grand houses they built were split among several heirs, who would just as soon sell them. When the stock market crashed in 1929, many fortunes were lost entirely, and with the Depression affecting outlying areas more than Pittsburgh itself, the city became inundated with economic migrants. Italians replaced the Germans in Bloomfield, and Italians, blacks, and Slavs moved to East Liberty. This coincided with a housing shortage, as the lack of available capital ground new construction to a halt. The upshot is that the grand houses would be converted into apartments, and the business district would no longer serve the same clientele. Nonetheless, the population was still increasing, and while it might have no longer been upscale, the East Liberty business district was still the commercial heart of the East End.

If the Depression masked one thing, though, it's that East Liberty's eventual decline was inevitable. The neighborhood's status was due to its transportation infrastructure. It developed as a village along the old Forbes Road, then the Greensburg Pike, then the railroad, and then electric streetcars. It was well suited to take advantage of each of these developments, but with the introduction of the automobile, it would be unable to maintain its advantage. East Liberty had begun as a rural village, became an exurb with the introduction of the railroad, and developed as a suburb. By the 1930s, however, it had been completely urbanized but still retained suburban infrastructure. Penn Ave. may have been East Liberty's main street, but a "three dimensional" business district had built up around it, as the commercial core also contained other major thoroughfares that passed through or terminated there, sometimes intersecting at odd angles—Highland, Center, Baum, Negley, and Larimer all carried a substantial amount of traffic. The Depression may have delayed the adoption of the automobile, but even then, it was clear that the area was not well-suited to efficient vehicular circulation. This wouldn't have been a problem had the neighborhood been built with density and walkability in mind, but that simply wasn't the case. As the streetcar gave way to the motorcar, East Liberty, with its traffic snarls and lack of parking, simply could not compete as a regional shopping destination.

By 1945, it was clear to East Liberty's businessmen that the situation was not sustainable. While the vacancy rate was still low, it was growing and persistent. There was no indication that the trend was going to reverse itself on its own. When the housing shortage turned into a boom after WWII, residents weren't interested in dense housing in urban areas but were looking to get a piece of what Thomas Mellon and other early East End residents were looking for a hundred years earlier. What the railroad had made possible for Mellon the auto made possible for ordinary Americans, who fled to the suburbs in droves. Obviously, not all Americans were able to do this, and not all wanted to. I don't want to speculate, but had East Liberty developed as a natural extension of industrial Pittsburgh, as Lawrenceville and the South Side had, East Liberty may have been able to stumble along until the industrial apocalypse of the 1980s and then ride it out for a couple of decades until people started moving back into cities. But as a suburb, it was always reliant on drawing business from beyond the local area. And to make matters even worse, the suburban nature of the early development meant that little industry, and thus little employment, was located in East Liberty itself. Even residents who lived nearby might prefer to do their shopping Downtown or wherever it was that they worked. At least the South Side could rely on thousands of mill employees to sustain a business district that was too big for the neighborhood. With no light at the end of the tunnel, drastic action needed to be taken.

13B. The Tragedy of Urban Renewal

It's easy for armchair urbanists to retrospectively criticize city planners and architects of the 1950s for not being able to predict the disasters that their ideas inflicted upon communities. But if one takes a step back and looks at things as they appeared at the time, it's difficult to see them arriving at another conclusion. Imagine you're of my grandfather's generation, born in the 1920s to immigrant parents and raised in a 4 room apartment with 6 brothers and sisters. Everyone burns coal for heat, and when combined with heavy industry, the winters are unbearably smoky. There are public sewers, but they discharge into the nearest watercourse, as do chemicals from the various industries. If you happen to live close to the river, flooding is a frequent concern, as there are no upstream reservoirs holding back the spring rain and snowmelt. Half the streets aren't paved; they turn to mud every time it rains and turn to dust when it doesn't. You look enviously at upscale neighborhoods where these issues are at least mitigated and assume that you'll never be able to live in a place like that. And then it becomes possible. Maybe your house will be modest by comparison, but it will be on a large lot with lots of separation from your neighbors and far from the smoke of the city.

And, perhaps most importantly, everything is new. What we now call historic charm was once representative of poverty and substandard living conditions. Add in 15 years of depression and war, when new construction was virtually nonexistent, and one can only imagine what it was like for someone who had always lived in old, crowded buildings to suddenly be able to have a shiny new house with gas heat, a garage, and conveniences like hose bibs and outdoor electrical outlets. And when they went shopping, it was at large, bright, modern stores where they could get everything they needed in one trip. This was not some conspiracy by Gulf Oil or whoever to trick people into thinking this way of life was preferable. They had lived the kind of lifestyle modern urbanists dream of their entire lives, and they rejected it.

But to suggest that urban renewal was an attempt to suburbanize the city, as most of the armchair urbanists do, would ignore the complex realities of what occurred. Slum clearance and urban freeway construction were two very different things. The Point project, which transformed a largely abandoned industrial area into a park and mixed-use development and heralded the beginning of urban renewal in the US, wouldn't seem out of place today but for the modernist architecture that no one seems to complain about. Coming out of WWII, American cities found themselves facing a crisis that seemed existential. In an era of unprecedented prosperity, they found their populations dropping, and their remaining population becoming poorer. Business districts were becoming increasingly low-rent, with large retailers consolidating and moving to the suburbs as well. Highways seem like intrusive eyesores now, but with tax bases dwindling, cities were more reliant than ever on downtown office space for revenue. If downtowns became too inconvenient for commuters, the corporate tax base might decamp for the suburbs as well. Highways aside, in Pittsburgh they were threatening to do so anyway.

The armchair urbanists argue that cities should develop in an organic, laissez-faire manner, as they had done in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this assumes that citizens prefer to live lifestyles conducive to those eras and not our own. If that were the case, the cities of Texas, California, Florida, and the rest of the Sun Belt would be touted as exemplars of good urbanism, and not the sprawling hellscapes that they're depicted as. The current avatars of urban renewal and good urbanism, respectively, are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. This is fitting, because neither is a particularly good choice. Moses was a politician and bureaucrat, but he never wrote anything save official reports; there is no monograph explaining or defending his planning philosophy. The primary text through which he is represented is Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker, which everyone cites but nobody reads; despite being over 1,000 pages long, everyone mentions the same four or five examples from it. Jacobs did write a book, but she had no formal training or professional experience in planning or any related discipline, except as a columnist for an architectural magazine. As sociologist and contemporary critic of renewal Herbert Gans put it in 1965, her "intent has been to save the city for people (intellectuals and artists, for example) who, like tourists, want jumbled diversity, antique 'charm,' and narrow streets for visual adventure and aesthetic pleasure."

Gans would know; Jacobs accompanied him for part of his research on the Italian community of Boston's North End. But he was largely dismissive of The Death and Life of American Cities when it was published in 1962. While he agreed with many of her objections to specific aspects of renewal programs, he felt that her evaluations of what made good neighborhoods were based on the assumption that everywhere should be like Greenwich Village. The urbanists today fall into the same trap when they look at places like Lawrenceville, or Wicker Park, or Williamsburg, or other urban neighborhoods they find desirable, and turn them into a Platonic ideal that should be superimposed everywhere. Less charitably, they are predominantly young, single, white, somewhat hip aspiring professionals who don't understand why everyone else shouldn't live like a young, single, white, somewhat hip aspiring professional. Gans and other theorists of the urban renewal era understood, whether they were in favor of it or opposed to it, that if cities were to survive the 20th century, they had to adapt to the pressures of the modern era. But they weren't dense enough to think that this would be accomplished by wholesale suburbanization, and they weren't naïve enough to think that they could lure suburbanites back to the city. Robert Moses, the paragon of urban renewal, built Stuy Town. People have described it in any number of ways over the years, most of them not particularly flattering, but I've never heard it described as suburban. Removing things people found distasteful was one part of urban renewal, but there was another side to the coin. Because, while the era is often criticized for its love affair with the wrecking ball, wholesale clearance was for slums that were beyond repair. But what about areas that weren't slums, but were heading in that direction? Would it be possible to save them before it was too late?

In East Liberty's case, city planners thought so. The problem, it seems, was the automobile. While armchair urbanists act like midcentury politicians had a love affair with the car, the reality was more complicated. There were certainly some who thought that the car was more important than the passengers or their destination, but many likewise felt threatened by them. The location of East Liberty, on a primary east-west artery, meant that it saw a lot of through traffic. The business district, which had developed long before the introduction of the auto, was ill-suited to heavy car traffic, with several main thoroughfares intersecting, often at odd angles. Coming to East Liberty to shop meant navigating this traffic nightmare and not having anywhere to park when you got there. On the other hand, residents of nearby affluent neighborhoods could easily drive to suburban shopping plazas on wide roads and find acres of parking. Saving the East Liberty business district would require simultaneously welcoming the auto and waging war against it.

Furthermore, the vacancies were making the business district unattractive. In the 1950s East Liberty had approximately 3 million square feet of retail space. That’s roughly equivalent to three average-sized shopping malls. Or one average size mall plus 15 or 20 Targets. Think of an average suburban shopping mall, and add all of the various plazas and big-box stores that surround it, and you get an idea of what 3 million square feet looks like. The East End could not support a shopping district of this size by the late 1950s, and demographic trends did not show the situation improving. The problem would only accelerate if the vacancies made the district less attractive to consumers. It needed to be right-sized so that it could serve the population that would realistically exist in the coming decades.

The plan was not simple, and it was not cheap. But it was clever, and it was bold. A new four-lane road, East Liberty Boulevard, would be constructed to the north of the business district. This would reduce congestion by allowing through traffic, which accounted for 70% of the total, to bypass the area with minimal stopping. Next, several streets on the perimeter would be converted into a four-lane, one-way traffic circle, the outer lane being used by cars wishing to exit the circle, the inner one by cars looking to park, and the middle two by those circumnavigating. Land on the circle would be cleared for parking and new, larger developments. A smaller inner circle (which was never completed) would be constructed to allow trucks to make deliveries. Finally, the core business district—parts of Penn, Highland, and Broad—would be turned into a pedestrian mall. Unlike in the Lower Hill, there would be no wholesale slum clearance; properties would only be marked for demolition if they were uninhabitable. Nevertheless, almost all of the wood frame residential structures in the development area were demolished, the ring road serving to delineate the residential parts of the neighborhood from the commercial. No great loss, though, as these would be replaced with massive apartment complexes designed by the emerging Pittsburgh "court architect" Tasso Katselas (who would design more notable buildings between 1960 and 2000 than anyone else).

It's ironic that almost everyone these days views the East Liberty development as a surrender to car-brained planning, as that was decidedly not the case at the time. There was a period from about 1959 to 1974 when pedestrian malls were all the rage and were implemented in several cities across the country. Pittsburgh's inspiration came from a temporary one built in Toledo in 1959 and 1960. The experience of street life there, where one could waddle, and dawdle, and enjoy the vibrant atmosphere, stood in stark contrast with the rest of the downtown, which was a traffic-clogged mess. That was only a temporary experiment though, and city officials soon reopened the street. As far as a permanent mall went, planners in Pittsburgh looked to a Fort Worth proposal developed by Victor Gruen. Gruen was an opponent of the large-scale renewal projects that were fashionable at the time but understood that there were certain realities he could not ignore. For inspiration, he looked to European cities with their narrow, medieval streets and abundant plazas. Like medieval cities, he thought a system of fortifications was needed to keep the enemy, automobiles, out of their cores. He viewed ring roads and systems of lots and garages as castle ramparts or city walls. Of the Fort Worth plan, Jane Jacobs wrote:

The plan by victor Gruen Associates for Fort Worth… has been publicized chiefly for its arrangements to provide enormous perimeter garages and convert the downtown into a pedestrian island, but its main purpose is to enliven the street with variety and detail… To these ends, the excellent Gruen plan includes in its street treatment sidewalk arcades, poster columns, flags, vending kiosks, display stands, outdoor cafes, bandstands, flower beds, and special lighting effects… The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before—not less so. One of the beauties of the Forth Worth plan is that it works with existing buildings, and this is a positive virtue, not just a cost-saving expedient.

Victor Gruen, it should be noted, was the Father of the American Shopping Mall, probably the most conspicuous symbol of a suburbanized retail environment. But Gruen was no suburbanist, and he doesn't fit neatly within the Moses–Jacobs paradigm. On a broad level, his overarching philosophy emphasized many of the ideas that have since become emblematic of the follies of midcentury planning and its influence on contemporary NIMBYism. He strongly believed that older cities had become outdated in the age of the auto and that their failure to properly adapt was largely the reason for their ongoing implosion, and he favored heavy-handed municipal planning, revised traffic flows, and segregated land use. On the other hand, his particular solutions emphasized increased housing density, better public transit networks, and keeping private autos as far away from centers of activity as possible. While the Fort Worth plan was never implemented, East Liberty would test the theory. If automobiles cannot be eliminated, they can be domesticated. Why allow our streets to become stroads when we can build roads to divert them? If consumers insist on adequate parking we can give them adequate parking, but when they leave their cars they can enter a pedestrian paradise, where they don't have to wait at crosswalks, worry about children running into traffic, or inhale carbon monoxide fumes. And we can also make it easier to go without a car entirely, by constructing large housing complexes on the periphery of the commercial area, within easy walking distance.

The three apartment towers built as part of the East Liberty renewal project—East Mall, Penn Circle Towers, and Liberty Park—were not built as housing projects and were not intended to house low-income residents. But changes in Federal housing policy in the mid-1970s made that a distinction without a difference. Public housing projects, as they were originally conceived, were intended to house both low- and moderate-income people. Policy changes and other factors made it so by the 1960s, these projects would only house the poorest of the poor. There was still a shortage, however, of housing for people whose incomes exceeded Federal caps but could nonetheless not afford housing in the private market.

By the 1960s, local housing authorities had little interest in constructing new projects, and Federal policy as a whole turned toward encouraging private developers to construct housing that would be available at affordable rates. Early programs focused on mortgage subsidies. The way these programs worked was that the Feds would partially subsidize mortgage interest on developments that were made affordable to those making 80% of the area median income. The developer would pay an effective rate of 1% on a mortgage that was fully insured by the government, but the units could only be rented by qualifying tenants at rates equal 25% income or a HUD-approved minimum, whichever was greater. While these programs showed early promise, enthusiasm cooled when developers found that the subsidies only lowered monthly rents by about $150/month in today's money, and they were superseded by the Housing and Community Development of 1974.

The 1974 act replaced mortgage subsidies with the much more widely known Section 8, which directly subsidized rents up to a HUD-determined fair market value. While some earlier projects operated as late as 2018, there was an option to convert to Section 8, and the Florida-based developer that owned and operated the East Liberty properties, Federal American, exercised that option. While most of us are familiar with voucher-based Section 8, where low-income families are given vouchers that can be used with any landlord who will accept them, prior to 1983 there was also a project-based Section 8 option. Rather than simply get a break on mortgage interest and hope that the things worked out economically while being tied to HUD rules, Federal American would get a flat per-unit payment from HUD to cover the cost of managing the properties and make a small profit. And any resident making up to 80% AMI would qualify. The upshot was that, by the mid-1970s, East Liberty was rapidly becoming a low-income neighborhood. Pennley Park and Penn Plaza, two unsubsidized low-rise apartment complexes that were constructed on the neighborhood's western edge in the mid-1960s, met a similar fate. While Pennley Park opened as an expensive luxury development that was home to Roberto Clemente and other Pirates when they still played at Forbes Field, its association with the towers was such that even at market rates it was only attractive to lower-income tenants.

Assuming that you read the title of this subsection, it should be obvious by now that the East Liberty redevelopment plan did not work out as expected. The first lesson learned, which should have been obvious to anyone, is that these projects aren't completed with a snap of the fingers. The project was officially announced in 1960, and plans were finalized in 1966. In the meantime, the city had begun infrastructure upgrades before construction began in earnest, and by the time the project was complete in the early 1970s, the merchants, complaining of reduced traffic since the 1950s, had endured nearly seven years of construction. Things would have to get worse before they could get better. And in the meantime, Eastland Mall opened in 1966 and Monroeville Mall in 1969, both enclosed suburban malls located on major roads an easy drive from the East End.

Nonetheless, the pedestrian mall was a short-lived success when it opened. Many businesses took the opportunity to renovate or expand operations, and the public space was frequently used by senior citizens and students from nearby Peabody High School. But the problems quickly became apparent. East Liberty Boulevard had been intended as a bypass for through traffic, but anyone familiar with the area who looks at a map can explain why it was ill-suited for that purpose. Its eastern end is well-situated, but on the west, it terminates on North Negley Ave. a few blocks north of Penn, which narrows considerably before entering Garfield. Baum and Center, to the south, see more through traffic than that part of Penn does, but are a long way from East Liberty Blvd. Assuming someone is headed in that direction, it made more sense to circumnavigate Penn Circle than to take a long, confusing bypass.

The above is my own interpolation and is based on my own observation of the current street grid (or at least of the pre-rectified street grid) and not the 1950s street grid. But I can tell you that I've been driving through there for 20 years and didn't know East Liberty Blvd. was supposed to be a through route for Penn until I was researching this installment. In any event, it was a mini-highway to nowhere before undergoing a road diet in the past few years. Penn Circle not only saw the bulk of the traffic, but at four lanes turned into a racetrack. Anyone wishing to access an interior parking lot would have to cross three lanes of high-speed traffic to get to the inside track. If you weren't in a car it was even worse, since it meant crossing four lanes of high-speed traffic on foot, across a road designed to minimize intersections and traffic signals. With the business district closed to cars and difficult for pedestrians to access, it succumbed to what architectural historian Anthony Paletta calls "strangulation by ring road".

Those with the most convenient access to the remodeled business district, the residents of the apartment complexes, could not afford to shop there. While the project was driven by business interests, these tended to be large, well-connected business interests, not small business owners. The smaller owners who were forced to relocate could often not afford the new real estate in the pedestrian mall, and those who did found it hard to survive the prolonged construction period. The resulting lack of diversity only served as an additional impediment to the project's success; the business district was dominated by three furniture stores, six banks, numerous five and dimes, and several department stores, all of which competed with one another more than they complemented one another. And then there was the aesthetic problem.

I mentioned earlier that Herbert Gans, the professional sociologist, accused Jane Jacobs of being more concerned with aesthetics than anything else, and I feel the same way about the armchair urbanists, whose arguments often boil down to aesthetic arguments about the kinds of neighborhoods they find pleasing or repulsive as opposed to the kinds of neighborhoods that work for the people who actually live in them. Similarly, one finds a similar discrepancy between Jacobs' praise for the Fort Worth proposal and an interview Gruen gave to Business Weekly in 1955. Jacobs discounts the practical advantages and gushes about the aesthetic elements. Gruen doesn't discuss aesthetics at all, aside from noting that the project would be landscaped. As critical as I may be of Jacobs, aesthetics are more important than some people realize. Gruen may not have though much of aesthetics when being interviewed, but they were nonetheless part of the plan. The problem with East Liberty wasn't so much that the developers ignored the aesthetic element as much as that their appreciation for its importance didn't go deep enough. Hiring award-winning landscape architecture firm Simonds and Simonds and including lots of public art checks off the box on paper, but what happens after the project is complete, and what other aesthetic elements come into play?

If we look at the history of pedestrian malls in America, a clear pattern emerges. The temporary malls of the 1950s and early 1960s did well. The permanent malls of the '60s and '70s were largely failures. But some succeeded, and those invariably tend to be in areas with a lot of tourist traffic. Fremont Street in Las Vegas is the most obvious example, but the pedestrianized part of East Fourth St. in Cleveland is probably a better one. While the city gets nowhere near the number of tourists as Vegas, Fourth is a single block downtown between Rocket arena and Cleveland Public Square, with Progressive Field within walking distance. A pedestrianized city street is no longer a functional city street, but an attraction in and of itself. The temporary malls were exciting because a lot of people were visiting the malls themselves and not any of the stores they contained. Once made permanent, they can't operate as retail districts unless there's some outside impetus to drive people to there independent of whatever the retailers are selling.

As such, aesthetics take on a more pressing importance, because as attractions in and of themselves, the malls are viewed by the public as curated spaces, and higher standards apply than to typical city streets. For example, if you're walking down a typical city street with shops and the like there is going to be some amount of litter that's tolerated, some amount of evident vandalism that's tolerated, some amount of griminess that's tolerated, and some amount of graffiti that's tolerated as a consequence of the urban environment. Different people will tolerate different amounts of it before it makes them uncomfortable, but no matter how sensitive you are, that amount will be a lot higher than what you would tolerate in a traditional enclosed mall. Seeing a lone graffito on the side of a building in a typical downtown might not merit a second glance, while seeing the same thing in a mall food court would cause serious unease. In an enclosed mall, we expect the environment to be controlled and maintained to a degree we don't out in the real world. A pedestrian mall operates somewhere between these two extremes. What the midcentury designers failed to understand was that if you turn a street into a tourist attraction, people expect it to be Disneyland. You can't design a pretty landscape and walk away; you have to be willing to provide maintenance and security. Likewise, private malls and tourist attractions have the ability to exclude people, and parks can post closing hours. A city street that has been pedestrianized is like a park that's open 24 hours a day and has more amenities than a typical city park, and will thus attract people with nowhere else to go, like bums and drunks. Especially if services meant to assist these people exist within its limits.

The East Liberty renewal project took a business district that was already in decline in a neighborhood that was already in decline and subjected it to construction for the better part of a decade, created a confusing, high-speed traffic pattern and relied on it for vehicular access, virtually cut off pedestrian access, effectively turned it into a park for which they made no accommodation for increased security or maintenance, and expected people to treat it like a normal shopping area. Such an effect may work on a bright, beautiful Saturday afternoon, consider the following: It's 6:30 pm a Tuesday in late February, it's rainy and cold, and there's some lingering snow on the ground. A mostly outdoor shopping experience where you'll be several minutes from your car by foot does not look good compared to the convenience of a suburban shopping center, where you'll have to walk 100 yards at most before you're within the comfortable surroundings of a store. Even a traditional business district looks better in comparison, despite being outdoors; you may get lucky and be able to park near your destination, and even if the business district has seen better days, the traffic at least makes things feel safer and more alive.

The question going forward is whether we've learned the aesthetic lesson. While aesthetics were a large part of the East Liberty project's failure, they were also what made it so attractive in the first place, and that aesthetic pull hasn't abated. The failure of pedestrian malls wasn't unique to Pittsburgh, and most of the streets around the country that were pedestrianized during the height of the fad in the 1960s and 1970s have since been either wholly returned to traffic or at least scaled back. New pedestrian projects have been selected with greater care to ensure that they won't meet the same fates as the older ones. The most obvious difference, aside from the smaller size and tendency to put them in tourist areas or college towns, is that they aren't centered around retail. The park-like atmosphere these places are trying to inspire, even if done well, works better with bars and restaurants than with Levin Furniture and Kohls. The lessons surrounding pedestrian malls have been learned, and the issues they have the potential to create are well-recognized among professional planners.

Among the general public, particularly the armchair urbanists, they have not and are not. East Liberty stands second only to the Lower Hill as an example of urban renewal gone wrong in Pittsburgh, and nearly everything written on the subject emphasizes the pedestrian mall as a large part of the problem, but there is nonetheless a contingent of people who either insist that this wasn't the problem or naively suggest pedestrianizing other parts of the city. A while back, Bike Pittsburgh posted an article absolving the mall of responsibility for East Liberty's decline and instead blaming the ring road. To be fair, the road should, and does, bear its share of the blame, but the pedestrian mall couldn't exist without it. The early temporary malls, like the one in Toledo, were experiments, and one of the lessons civic leaders learned was that you couldn't simply block off a major street without making accommodations for the change in traffic flow. Personally, I don't much care for pedestrian malls, except perhaps in certain areas where allowing cars would be obviously ridiculous, in which case nobody would ever suggest building roads. I dislike them precisely because they tend to create a sterile, touristy atmosphere that seems apart from the main city. But that's, admittedly, an aesthetic preference.

13C. The Kingdom of Forgetting

The years 1977 to 2000 were ones of continual decline for East Liberty. That the project had failed to preserve the neighborhood as the East End's premiere shopping destination was self-evident. The question of what to do moving forward wasn't as clear. The businessmen who had spearheaded the endeavor had too much invested to cut bait, but there was no obvious intervention. The urban renewal era was over, and the $100 million of largely Federal money spent on the redevelopment would not be forthcoming to undo the mistake. In light of East Liberty's subsequent gentrification, there's a tendency to identify a specific turning point and assume that it was all downhill before and all uphill since. What tends to be forgotten is twenty years of repeated small-scale attempts to jumpstart the revitalization process that ultimately led nowhere.

While the project's failure may have been apparent by the mid-1970s, the first official recognition of it came in 1979, when Mayor Richard Caliguri authorized that city funds be spent to address some of the problems. Police presence was increased, a promotional campaign was launched, and, most importantly, surveyors began looking at how the streets could be reopened to traffic. By the end of the year, part of Baum Blvd. saw cars. Bus lanes that had penetrated the pedestrian mall would be opened to traffic and widened. More streets would be quietly reopened in the ensuing years, and in November of 1986, Penn Ave. finally saw regular traffic again. By the end of the decade, East Liberty began to resemble a typical urban neighborhood. In 1982, abandoned rail lines in the ravine at the neighborhood's southern boundary would be converted into the East Busway, situating the neighborhood on a prime transit route.

But there was little the city could do in terms of infrastructure improvements to save the business district, which was the prime target of the renewal efforts. Three department stores closed in 1979, and East Liberty's place as Pittsburgh's second downtown was by then a distant memory. The residential towers had become typical Section 8 projects, the unsubsidized low-rise developments weren't faring much better, and the outlying residential district was a shambles of houses cut up into apartments run by absentee landlords. In other words, East Liberty had become a ghetto, the refuge of people who had nowhere else to go. As an East Liberty resident put it in a 1984 letter to the Pittsburgh Press:

East Liberty has more drug rehab centers, homes for special citizens, half-way houses, homes for unwed mothers, senior citizen homes, housing for low-income, housing for elderly and nursing homes per square mile of area than the remainder of Allegheny County.

But the merchants weren't giving up. Members of the Chamber of Commerce formed East Liberty Development Incorporated in 1979. With urban renewal in the process of being undone, ELDI would attempt to revitalize the neighborhood not through the gargantuan redevelopment projects that had characterized the previous era but through bottom-up, grassroots economic development and aesthetic improvement. But while they were able to attract a series of investors, none of these projects bore fruit. I'm not going to detail every instance that someone started a project that was heralded as East Liberty finally turning the corner, including an abortive attempt at turning it into an arts district, but I think the story of Motor Square Garden is illustrative.

Motor Square Garden was built as a sort of market hall in the 1890s and in the years since had variously been a boxing arena, Cadillac Dealership, convention center, beer garden, and office complex. In 1984, developer Joseph Massaro announced his intention to turn the space into a high-end mini-mall with 84,000 square feet and room for up to 40 stores. Following renovations, the complex opened in April 1988 with 20 stores and much excitement. It seemed that East Liberty had finally turned the corner. Coming out of its first Christmas shopping season, the retailers agreed that sales had met or exceeded expectations, though Massaro admitted that more tenants would be needed if the project was to turn a profit. Still, this was good news, and there was hope.

On March 1, Massaro failed to make a payment on a $12 million mortgage, and Equibank filed court paperwork to become a mortgagee in possession. Massaro emphasized to the media that the building was not in foreclosure and that the same management company was running the property, which was true for about a week, before foreclosure proceedings were initiated. It's unclear if what happened next was due to poor sales or uncertainty over ownership, but by Summer only 15 stores remained open, and by November that was down to six, with two announcing they were on their way out. A newspaper writer reviewing luxury mini-malls in the city wrote in mid-July that she counted only two other people on the concourses, store employees looked bored, and that some of the kiosks were unmanned and had notes to alert employees in another store for assistance. She concluded "…there is something downright creepy about wandering through the mall. You can smell the desperation and despair of the small merchants, and you feel conspicuous for just being there." By 1991, the only business left operating was, fittingly enough, an Equibank branch. Even more fittingly, the building now serves as AAA's regional headquarters and a Driver's License Center.

The luxury mini-mall craze is a trend that has largely been forgotten. There were no fewer than a half-dozen of these places in Pittsburgh in the late '80s, almost all within the city limits, the remainder not far outside. Today, only one of them is still open, and the owner wants to turn it into a Wegman's. At the time, malls were at their peak both in terms of economic and social influence, and were seen as a form of mass culture. I think the idea developed that upscale stores weren't suited for traditional malls with their hordes of teenagers, and that their customers would want a more exclusive experience where they could avoid the hoi polloi. Two of the ones in Pittsburgh were in Downtown office towers.

If one were looking at Motor Square Garden the way a 1980s retailer looked at it, the idea made perfect sense: It was close to wealthy neighborhoods, parking was cheap, and it was a beautiful beaux arts building. Massarro, like the others who attempted to revive East Liberty during this period, was not doing it out of a sense of charity; he was a true believer. Was fear of crime the problem? Maybe, but you can park right next to the building, and it didn't have trouble attracting customers initially. Massarro admitted that he didn't have any experience in the leasing business, and that he assumed the management company he hired would take care of that for him.

My theory as to why it failed goes deeper than that, and isn't wholly unrelated to the large-scale urban renewal efforts of midcentury. If retail districts are heading to the suburbs, you have two options to combat the loss of business: You can replicate the suburbs, or you can offer something the suburbs don't. The first option is a losing proposition, because duplicating a suburban shopping mall in an urban area just offers the same thing with paid parking and less room for expansion on the periphery. The second option looks more attractive, but is fraught with its own perils. The first is that you may simply be beating the suburbs to the punch, and will end up losing out when a developer realizes he can do the same thing elsewhere. The bigger problem, and what I think happened here, is that the idea might not be economically feasible wherever it is tried.

The upscale mall concept mostly flopped. Of the six that were profiled in the Post-Gazette article, the only one still in operation is the Galleria of Mt. Lebanon, which has a few upscale stores but is frequented more for its movie theater and non-upscale restaurants. What we now call "upscale malls" are really just regular malls that have a number of upscale tenants. What happened with Motor Square Garden was really just a microcosm of the retail environment of the old pedestrian mall and its lack of retail diversity. If a mall is nothing but a bunch of high-end clothing stores, you get nothing but customers looking to buy high-end clothing. Every single store is now competing for the same small pool of customers, and not all of them will be able to survive. When the options start dwindling, customers have less and less of a reason to show up in the first place, and the development enters a death spiral. Now drop five or six of these developments into a market where things aren't great economically, to put it mildly, with a developer who has no idea what he's doing, and you can guess the outcome.

ELDI spent most of the 80s and 90s pursuing projects like this. Some true believer really sees the potential in East Liberty, launches a small development that's supposed to turn things around, then either gets nowhere, fails, or achieves the immediate goals but makes no lasting impact. Because let's face it, even if Motor Square Garden were successful, it would have done absolutely nothing to address the neighborhood's larger problems. An upscale shopping plaza on the neighborhood's periphery would have been exactly that, with patrons a short walk from their BMWs to the safe, clean, aesthetically pleasing concourses inside, oblivious to the blight surrounding them. By the mid-90s ELDI was in shambles, having gone through a parade of executive directors and having lost the trust of the neighborhood they represented. They were viewed with suspicion, a consortium of white business owners trying in vain to resurrect the glory days when East Liberty was the commercial heart of the East End. Meanwhile, community leaders in neighboring Shadyside, Highland Park, and Bloomfield were demanding new leadership be brought in from outside of Pittsburgh, as the crime and drug problems were starting to spill over into upscale communities.

Maelene Myers is an Akron native who ran a similar community organization in Cleveland before becoming Executive Director of ELDI in 1996. After 15 years of sputtering, the hope was that a black woman with experience as a community organizer would be able to heal the rift that had developed between the organization and the community and figure out the best path forward. Her first move was to tear ELDI down to the studs, reorganizing its corporate structure and rejecting the haphazard manner with which it had operated in the past. Her second order of business was to hold a public meeting where she allowed residents to speak for as long as they wanted about whatever they wanted. Over the course of several meetings, she go a sense of what kind of community the residents wanted East Liberty to be, and she organized volunteer committees to figure out how to make it happen.

At this stage of the game, where expressions like "community empowerment" have become meaningless buzzwords, I'm almost embarrassed to have typed the preceding paragraph in a tone that sounds like what she did was revolutionary. But imagine you're among the demographic of older, mostly black, residents of East Liberty that was likely to attend these meetings. You remember what it was like in the old days, when the neighborhood really was Pittsburgh's second downtown, and you remember Richard King Mellon, and several mayors, and several councilmen, and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, all tell you about how radical reconstruction of East Liberty would save the business district, which you didn't see anything wrong with, but whatever. Then you endured years of construction and demolition, and the project flopped so hard they started tearing it out only a few years after it was finished. And all the while the neighborhood got poorer, and less diverse, and the businesses that they warned would close if the project didn't get done now actually were closing despite the project being done. And then there's a parade of guys with money who swear they're going to turn things around but before you know it their properties are in foreclosure, one after the other, and now there are drugs and gangs and shootings and no middle-class person in their right mind would want to live here and the big apartment buildings that looked shiny and modern when they were new are now called the "crack stacks". And of course they all had their money and statistical reports and sociological theories that told them that this is what was best for the community, and they proved themselves wrong, but they're all dead now so what are you going to do about it? You can understand how after 40 years of bullshit, someone finally asking the actual residents how they felt and what they wanted to see would seem revolutionary.

Following years of meetings and workshops, ELDI produced a long-range plan in 1999. Again, this seems anodyne, but East Liberty had never had such a document. Even the original renewal plan was too focused on a specific project to really count; by it's own terms, the project was a success because everything in it got built, never mind that it had the exact opposite effect that it was supposed to. The 1999 plan did not propose any specific projects beyond what was already in development, but acted as a framework for future development. What was in the plan? In a nutshell, it called for development of vacant parcels, restoration of the street grid, and demolition of anything that could plausibly be described as "mid-century". Now Myers only had to Draw the Rest of the Fucking Owl.

13D. The G-Word

In the late 90s, there was a lot to be excited about in East Liberty. A Home Depot had opened on the site of an old Sears, marking the first investment in the community by a national chain in decades. Spinning Plate Lofts brought in artists-in-residence. There was a farmer's market. And Pennley Park had been demolished and replaced with New Pennley Place, a mixed-income development. By the middle of the next decade, you could buy expensive groceries at Whole Foods, eat dinner at Abaya Ethiopian (the first Ethiopian restaurant in the city), go soul dancing at Shadow Lounge or see a jazz show at the sister club Ava Lounge, and top off the night with a waffle from an all-night waffle stand whose name I can't remember. For a dazzling young urbanite, East Liberty might not have been a residential option, but it was increasingly a commercial one.

For anyone less adventurous, it was still synonymous with drugs and crime, and that stigma would have to be broken for any further progress to be made. The actual crime rate was never as high as it was made out to be. It wasn't appreciably higher than upscale areas nearby, and was nowhere near the level of Pittsburgh's worst ghettos. But perception is everything, and for people who associate poor, black areas with a history of drug problems with crime, statistics will be of little comfort. The same is true in reverse, though. On the ground, it looked like things were finally changing, and like many big changes, it began to induce anxiety.

At the heart of the issue were East Mall, Penn Circle Towers, and Liberty Park South. East Mall in particular loomed over the neighborhood, straddling both sides of Penn Ave. where it joined Penn Circle West. They dominated the skyline, and anyone who read the 1999 report knew that their days were numbered. The plan showed an artist's rendering of the East Liberty skyline dominated not by the towers but by East Liberty Presbyterian Church. The parish was founded by Jacob Negley back in East Liberty's pike town days, and the current structure was built with Mellon money in 1935, coincidentally the last structure completed in the neighborhood prior to urban renewal. Along Penn Ave., in place of the low-rises stood new, small-scale row houses, meant to invoke the spirit of the city's architectural past. Of course, being a mere roadmap, the plan, and the rendering, were purely aspirational. In any event, ELDI was sensitive to the displacement concerns that had plagued redevelopment efforts in the past, and as an organization that was supposedly sensitive to citizen needs, they couldn't put a concrete proposal forward anyway unless they had plan to relocate residents within the neighborhood.

I did not discuss the towers much in earlier sections because there is a tendency in some circles to blame them for the failure of renewal in East Liberty, much as there is a tendency in other circles to blame the redesigned road network. While both undoubtedly played a part in accelerating the decline, the pedestrian mall concept was doomed to failure regardless of whatever else happened. But once that decline was total, the towers did stand as an impediment to the future revitalization of the neighborhood. If there was one overarching theme to the 1999 plan, it was that all vestiges of urban renewal were to be eliminated. The plan itself lists practical reasons for wanting this, but there is a crucial subtext: The entire project was deemed a failure before the paint was even dry, and any remnants of the project would only remind people of that failure. And the most visible remnants were the three towers that stood at East Liberty's periphery, looming over the neighborhood, symbolizing all that was wrong with it.

There were also more immediate, practical concerns. In recent years, affordable housing proposals from various cities often state eye-watering sums; it is somewhat of an oxymoron for "affordable" housing to cost $500,000 per unit. When public money is involved, there is often grumbling that an apartment for a poor person shouldn't cost that much, and that the public shouldn't be paying for unproductive people to live in luxury. That same argument, however, was a matter of public policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the results spoke for themselves. The East Liberty towers were constructed using an innovative method that did not require a steel or concrete superstructure. Instead, they were made with prefabricated concrete panels and brick buttressing walls, tied together with steel rods. An entire floor could be constructed in three days. While this method cut costs, it limited the expected life of the buildings to 40 years, of which only ten were left when the 1999 plan was released. To make matters worse, the owner, Federal American, had allowed the buildings to deteriorate.

By 2000, pretty much everyone wanted to see the towers gone. Residents complained about lack of security and maintenance. Police had dubbed them the "crack stacks" and saw them, and East Mall in particular, as breeding grounds of crime. ELDI saw them as symbols of urban renewal and incompatible with their vision for the neighborhood as a small town within the East End. Councilwoman Valerie McDonald said she would pull the lever on the wrecking ball herself if given the chance. Mayor Tom Murphy was willing to back any big project that he could take credit for. Legislative aide, future mayor, and part-time real estate agent Ed Gainey thought that demolishing them would cause property values to go up enough to allow long-time homeowners to get loans for necessary improvements, increasing the neighborhood's desirability even further. Most importantly, Federal housing policy was increasingly in favor of eliminating these kinds of projects, and absentee landlords like Federal American were squarely in the crosshairs.

The only sticking point was that over 1,000 families still lived in the towers, and there was nowhere else for them to go. If immediate demolition wasn't an option, then kicking out Federal American was an acceptable consolation prize. The Community Builders, a developer out of Boston who had recently purchased Pennley Park and rebuilt it into New Pennley Place, was enlisted in the late 1990s to begin negotiations with Federal American and HUD to purchase the properties, with the goal of stabilizing them so that they would remain inhabitable while newer projects were under construction, at which point the residents could be easily relocated before the towers were demolished. They purchased East Mall and Penn Circle in 2001, and intended to purchase Liberty Park shortly thereafter. However, in early 2002, the deal unraveled after HUD declared that the conditions at all three properties had deteriorated below minimum standards and pulled their operating subsidies. Residents were given Section 8 vouchers, allowing them to remain in their homes, but since the money went with the tenants, TCB now found itself without a reliable source of income and with a black mark on its record that could jeopardize its ability to get Federal funding for future projects.

The plan in danger of collapsing, Tom Murphy met with Rick Santorum and HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, and was able to secure a $40,000/unit redevelopment subsidy. But he was unable to restore the HUD subsidy in its entirety, and there was no guarantee that TCB would be the developer. Worse, the specter of urban renewal was once again rearing its head. Neither residents of the towers, nor the developer, nor ELDI had a seat at the table; once again, politicians were deciding their fate. HUD foreclosed on Liberty Park (still owned by Federal American) in May and the other two properties in November. They then turned them over to our old friend the Urban Redevelopment Authority, who at that time could ill-afford to run them.

What happened next is notable if only for the unintentional comedy of it all, as the mayor decided to celebrate the demolition of East Mall with an event called Get Down!, which featured food, live entertainment, and a "public art" exhibition that involved lobbing water balloons filled with paint at the tower with a slingshot. The event was eerily similar to the opening scene from Season 3 The Wire, which had aired about six months prior. I haven't talked about Murphy since way back in the installment on Downtown, but by 2005, he was on his third term and possibly the most unpopular person in the city. While I have no doubt that he was sincere in his intentions to revitalize Pittsburgh, he believed the way to do so was through 60s-style public boondoggles, particularly favoring public-private partnerships where the private leg got all the profit while the public leg took on all the risk. He was quick to take credit for dubious accomplishments, most notably pushing through a backup plan for a taxpayer-funded stadium deal after the taxpayers had already rejected Plan A in a public referendum.

As far as East Liberty was concerned, he personally escorted the CEO of Home Depot to the site of the old Sears where he wanted them to build a store, before offering them millions in incentives. After the store, which opened in 2000, was successful, and things began improving over subsequent years, he took credit for East Liberty's revival, calling the store a "catalyst" for redevelopment. Sorry Tom, but there had been various catalysts thrown at the wall over the course of the previous 20 years, all of them leading to nothing. The Home Depot just as easily could have failed in the same manner the Lord & Taylor he gave a boatload of money to to build a location Downtown failed. Or it could have been successful and still failed to do anything for the neighborhood around it.

Yes, everyone wanted East Mall to go. But the circumstances surrounding its demise were stressful to those who lived there, and Murphy's role in the deal didn't make him look good. Granted, he probably did all he could, but selling a bad deal as a cause for celebration just because you were powerless to do better is rather tone deaf. The original plan was that housing developments on other sites would be built, the residents of the towers gradually relocated, and the towers demolished once they were empty. Instead, there was a mad dash to find residents housing, preferably in East Liberty or a majority-white neighborhood nearby. Instead, relocation efforts ran into a tight housing market and neighborhoods where landlords refused to accept Section 8 vouchers.

This is around the time that the idea of gentrification first entered the public consciousness around here. Even by this point, East Liberty's revitalization was not a bottom-up increase in demand as outsiders discovered the charms of a long-neglected neighborhood. Instead, it was a deliberate effort by politicians, business owners, and developers to remake an area that they thought was undervalued. If the towers had been in a hopeless ghetto, there would have been complaining, but the circumstances of their destruction wouldn't have precipitated the same anxiety. It appeared to many that the Powers That Be wanted East Liberty for themselves, little people be damned. Those who were more thoughtful did say that those involved did the best they could and were unusually successful given the circumstances, but there was still a lingering mistrust.

East Mall and Liberty Park were demolished in 2005. By the time Penn Circle finally came down in 2009, a switch had been flipped, and the neighborhood's development went into high gear. By that time, Target had announced they would build a store on the site, and Google would be moving into an abandoned Nabisco factory that was being converted into a mixed-use development. Philips Respironics would be constructing an office building across the street. It seemed like every time I drove through, something was under construction, and the southern half of the commercial district was inhabited almost completely by semi-casual upper-middle-class restaurants.

By this point, ELDI had developed a close relationship with developer Walnut Capital and contractor Mosites, and had a seemingly uncanny ability to sell the remaining low-income residents on whatever bougie development project they wanted to push through, only asking that the developers occasionally throw a few affordable units their way to make it look like they were doing something. By now, it had been nearly 20 years since Maelene Myers sat in a church basement and asked a desperate populace what they wanted their neighborhood to look like, and memories of the bad old days were beginning to fade. The genius of ELDI at this time was that they could run seemingly parallel systems where they'd push whatever headline project Walnut Capital was pushing while at the same time working on their own affordable developments elsewhere.

At the same time, evidence that the neighborhood was changing was difficult to ignore and began to instill a feeling of uneasiness among some. In the first half of the 2000s, changes had started but the negative reputation persisted and it still seemed like the big change was just around the corner. In the second half of the decade, the stigma had faded but the look and feel of the old East Liberty still persisted. In the first half of the 2010s, however, development went into high gear, and before anyone knew it, the idea that the place ever had a negative reputation seemed like a distant memory. With ELDI continuing to buy distressed properties and convert them into safe affordable developments, residents and activists could feel as uneasy as they wanted to, but couldn't point to anything specific. But it was only a matter of time before that would change.

In July 2015, 200 residents of Penn Plaza received 90-day eviction notices. Penn Plaza was built in the 1960s under a mortgage subsidy program, but the mortgage was paid off in 2000, and the owners, LG Realty, had converted it to a market rate development. By 2015, the outdated building was only attractive to the low-end of the market, and rents were accordingly low. While the owners accepted Section 8 vouchers, the complex was also home to working people whose incomes were too high to qualify for rental assistance. With East Liberty now being considered prime real estate, these people would have difficulty finding anywhere nearby that they could afford.

LG had planned to build a new, larger site for Whole Foods in one of the buildings, that would be topped with several stories of office space. The rest of the property would contain 200 market rate apartments. In the process, they planned on buying the adjacent Enright Parklet from the city, as the development would cut off access. The building's residents, forced to relocate on short noticed, appealed to the city, and that December, mayor Bill Peduto was able to negotiate a memorandum of understanding that would extend the relocation period and provide residents with relocation assistance. A further snag developed when residents of the area to the south of the site protested the elimination of Enright Parklet. Most of the residents had relocated by March of 2016, though, and the city said that they would not be letting go of the park and would work with the developer to ensure that access would be maintained.

In a sane world, that would have been the end of it. In the real world, the abrupt notices to vacate in 90 days mobilized a small army of activists and protestors, bemoaning the actions of LG Realty. For their part, LG responded in the worst way possible. The size of the development required two community meetings, which are normally routine informational sessions with Power Point presentations, architectural drawings, and question-and-answer sessions. Fearing protests, LG scheduled these meetings at the last minute, with no handouts, in an attempt to railroad the proposal through. The tactics didn't work, as the meetings became shouting matches with protestors anyway, and their stance pissed off both the staunchly pro-development ELDI as well as city hall. There were also still about 20 holdouts living in one of the remaining buildings, and LG initiated a pressure campaign by beginning demolition work on the site.

The result of this circus was that, in January of 2017, the city Planning Commission unanimously rejected LG's preliminary proposal for the site. LG responded by suing, alleging that they had followed the letter of the law and the Planning Commission had no legitimate basis on which to reject the proposal. The city responded by suing LG and obtaining a stop-work order on the demolition, alleging that asbestos abatement was going on in occupied buildings and that the work was creating other dangerous conditions and did not have the necessary approvals. Meanwhile, the NIMBYs to the south weaponized the park issue as a means to block the development, taking the position that the development would unacceptably limit public access. This was a particularly rich position to take, because the park was already only accessible from one street without any parking; the Friends of Enright Parklet, as they called themselves, had essentially lucked into having a semi-private park and wanted to keep it that way. Most of the original opponents to the project were mollified by the city's agreement for a land swap that would see the park renovated and reconfigured to ensure more access, but a small group (led by a guy who lived in New York but owned a house nearby) continued to cause trouble. The remaining tenants were out of Penn Plaza by the end of March, but the city and LG would be stuck in arbitration for the next six months, during which time Whole Foods pulled out of the deal.

The result of the arbitration was that LG would agree to commit some money to affordable housing and submit a new preliminary proposal. But the advocates had demands of their own. They wanted LG to commit to some percentage of affordable housing on the site, which they refused to do. A billboard saying "There are Black People in the Future" went up on a building in March of 2018, and a small controversy erupted when the landlord removed it a month later following complaints. On May 15, nearly three years after the eviction notices were sent out, the Planning Commission approved LG's preliminary plan, amid a charged atmosphere where the names of all 1500 people who had written letters in protest were read. LG had made it clear that they were prepared to head back to court if approval wasn't granted. With preliminary approval secured, Whole Foods was back on board, and construction of the first phase began a year later. The store opened in 2022, and the Enright Park reconstruction finished last year. The adjoining lot, that was meant for luxury apartments, sits vacant. Development is supposedly in progress, but not much seems to be happening with it ten years after the eviction notices went out.

In the aftermath of the controversy, the relationship between the city and developers changed markedly. Inclusionary zoning policies were implemented, and ad hoc community groups could now become registered Community Benefit Organizations, ensured a seat at the table. The result is that East Liberty has lost some of the luster it had a decade ago. From the perspective of LG, it was a private company trying to develop its own property. It was not taking land by eminent domain, and it wasn't managing subsidized apartments that required HUD involvement. They followed the letter of the law and got vilified for it. For the activists, what LG did was an object lesson in the harms of gentrification, which was really just urban renewal in a new guise. The only thing that mattered was that people were being displaced, and the fact that it was a private company doing it and not the government wasn't relevant. ELDI was caught in the middle. They weren't consulted on the matter, and understood that while LG was within its rights legally, if they had come to them first they could have put a plan together that would have gotten the community and politicians on board and thus avoided the mess. But ELDI's unabashedly pro-development stance got them in trouble with the activists anyway; LG's behavior was the natural consequence of ELDI rolling out the red carpet for any developer who wanted to build anything. Any of their commitments to community engagement were just cover so the business owners who ran the organization could run wild. The city was caught in the middle as well. Peduto bent over backwards to provide relocation assistance in what he described as the only time the city had ever done that for private tenants, but was roasted by the activists anyway because of the occasional hiccups and his inability (or unwillingness) to bend LG to their will.

East Liberty has thus become synonymous with gentrification. The final irony is that the process seems to have stalled. As the Penn Plaza saga was raging, there were already concerns that the market for luxury apartments was becoming saturated. At the same time, The Buncher Company was putting up building after building in the Strip District, where pissing off long-time residents wasn't a problem because there weren't any. Interest rate hikes in the early 2020s made new construction less attractive, and by this point, East Liberty has been doing well enough for long enough that there are NIMBYs to deal with as well. Just last year a developer withdrew a proposal to redevelop Mellon's Orchard North, another mid-century complex that was abandoned in 2018 after ELDI successfully relocated the residents to the new Mellon's Orchard South. In the meantime, Maelene Myers is still in her position after 30 years. When asked about whether she felt her actions led to gentrification, she responded:

All the people who couldn’t get out of East Liberty were the ones that built East Liberty’s community plans. The seniors, the veterans, the unemployed, all the people from the high rises who said, “I want better. We deserve better.” That’s how the plan was written, why it became important, and why ELDI became the steward of that plan. When I walk outside now and see a new population that some people say are “gentrifying” the neighborhood, well that wasn’t what people thought back in 1996. They used Shadyside as a model of what they wanted—walkable streets, stores, family friendly. They didn’t want to see the drug wars. They wanted to be able to walk down their street. They wanted the heyday that they had become accustomed to before Urban Renewal. They wanted to be able to enjoy the East Liberty, that in their minds, was Pennsylvania’s third downtown. And they wanted me to help them figure out a way to fix that, never going back to those dark times that shut down the neighborhood and made them feel like Black people didn’t matter. East Liberty today was built for those legacy residents who stayed course, who lost so much to be able to benefit from this. People coming in now are probably not going to know how bad it was. They probably aren’t going to understand what those residents went through to make it possible for them to enjoy now. The families that stayed the course are very grateful, because their home values increased, they have equity, and the neighborhood is walkable and beautiful. It’s everything that they said they wanted to me in the 90s. And I made sure that it was their vision, not mine. I try to make sure everyone that I work with understands that they’re working on behalf of the community and that we’re simply a tool to get things done.

At the start of the 2010s, Penn Circle took on the names of the streets that had preceded it. At the end of the decade, work began to restore those streets to two-way traffic, which is now complete. In 2024, the last original remnant of the pedestrian mall was demolished and updated. The work of eliminating the remaining vestiges of the urban renewal era is nearly complete.

13E. The East Liberty of Today

Now that we've finally reached the present, I'll give a rundown of the various subsections. This isn't like Oakland where there are well-recognized subsections with different names, but the area is large enough that there is some variation in feel. First, there's the area bordering Friendship south of Enright Park and home (or not) to its notorious "friends". This is similar to Friendship itself in that it is mostly large brick houses built between about 1890 and 1910 which, due to their size, have often been split up into apartments. Like Friendship, this area never had substantial white flight, and also like Friendship, it nonetheless went through a "sketchy" phase. This area is almost entirely residential, but there are a few businesses on the southern end near Baum. Back in the days when it was hard to find craft beer in the wild, one of those restaurants with 500 beers on tap opened here, and advertised itself as being in Friendship, in order to not scare off their target demographic. But this area was never considered part of Friendship, despite the similarities.

Next we have Downtown East Liberty, the commercial core which is within the bounds of the old Penn Circle, present day Euclid St. , Station St., and Center Ave. The commercial district is notable because was historically one of Pittsburgh's few "three dimensional" business districts that encompasses multiple streets rather than a single strip as in Lawrenceville or the South Side. Though this has been lost to a certain degree due to the urban renewal, there are still three major commercial streets (Penn, Highland, and Center), two minor ones (Broad and Baum), and a few other random storefronts scattered around. The most gentrified portion of the business district is along Center and South Highland, near the border with Shadyside (in some cases officially in Shadyside). This is where gentrification began, with the original Whole Foods location, and things took off from there, and have now gotten to the point where there's none of the old East Liberty left. Nearby portions of Baum are a mix of long-time stable but unfashionable businesses and new gentrified ones.

Penn, while the traditional commercial heart of East Liberty, is still remarkably similar to the way it was prior to gentrification, with many of the businesses still catering to a lower-class, black clientele. Target is on one end and the new Whole Foods is at the other, but a lot of the rest is dollar stores, vape shops, hair salons, and the like. North Highland seems to be mostly a failure, with a lot of newly renovated but still vacant storefronts. There are a few bougie businesses, and Hotel Indigo, but one gets the sense that The Rent Is Too Damn High for anyone to take a chance on it, and the vendors that are there complain about a lack of foot traffic. Broad St. seems to be mostly the offices of small nonprofits, with a few low-income businesses thrown in for good measure. I get the impression that since there's no reason to take a car down this street most people don't even think to come down here.

The business district stands between two old project areas that remain deliberately mixed-income residential areas. The smaller one, across from the Whole Foods is New Pennley Place, along with the vacant, hazardous Mellon's Orchard buildings that the local NIMBYs prefer to new ones (they may occasionally catch fire, reek of dead animals in the summer, and harbor rodents, but at least they don't generate any traffic). On eastern side, north of the Target, are mixed income developments on the sites of the former Liberty Park and East Liberty Gardens, as well as some new ones on East Liberty Boulevard extending into adjacent Larimer. There are obviously better places to live if you have a choice, but none of these areas are anything approaching dangerous, and are absolutely nothing compared to what they replaced. There's also one of the few remaining midcentury remnants, Enright Place, a collection of rather dumpy townhomes that ELDI sold for cheap to encourage home ownership for people with moderate incomes. Since gentrification has taken hold, there is a vanishingly small number of people who are complaining that the neighborhood's legacy of mid-century architecture is being lost. Those people can take comfort in the fact that, being condos, these will exist until the sun swells into a red giant and engulfs the earth.

There is a small residential area in East Liberty which is west of N Highland and South of East Liberty Boulevard. The area is a somewhat confusing mix of different developments—everything from apartments to houses, with a lot of unfortunate mid-century infill mixed in. I've walked these streets quite a bit, and there has been some infill construction over the past decade, along with quite a few rehabs. The majority of the residential portion of East Liberty is north of here, between East Liberty Boulevard and Stanton Ave. The housing quality changes as you go north, going from frame to brick, similar to those in adjacent Highland Park. One notable exception is N Beatty, which has the Alpha Terrace historic district, made up of stone rowhouses. This area suffered a lot through East Liberty's bad period but was a big focus of ELDI in its neighborhood reconstruction. Virtually every single empty lot in this zone had some sort of single-family infill. That said, the area is lacking in walkable amenities. Aside from an auto garage and a barbershop, there are no businesses in this area, and it takes around 15 minutes to walk into East Liberty's commercial district. Thus it will never be "hot" in the same sense that Lawrenceville is.

To the east of here, Home Depot and the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary occupy large parcels that span several city blocks and cut down on the neighborhood's continuity. Further east, on the neighborhood's edge, is a small residential zone. I have no historical sources to back this up, but you can tell from walking around that this area was never as wealthy as the rest of East Liberty, and it has accordingly been slow to gentrify. The houses are frame, many of them small, and some are still boarded up. ELDI has built some small infill houses on vacant lots for people with moderate incomes, but much of the rest is too unattractive to any significant investment. Finally, on the opposite side of East Liberty, there are a few blocks west of Negley in a no-man's land between East Liberty, Garfield, Morningside, Highland Park, and Stanton Heights. This area has historically been called Negley Place, presumably by residents who didn't want to be associated with East Liberty but wouldn't be accepted as Highland Park. This area never fell as hard as the rest of the neighborhood, but the level of gentrification isn't as high either. I suspect that the stability of the neighborhood has something to do with it, as the houses that were owner-occupied or owned by responsible landowners were never targeted by ELDI for refurbishment.

Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying, though how far this goes remains to be seen in the coming decades. While much has happened over the past 20 years, there is still plenty of buildable land on the old Penn Circle, and whether this is developed depends on market conditions. The one odd thing about all of this is that, for all the talk of gentrification, East Liberty was never "hot" in the way that Lawrenceville was and is. When the neighborhood was first starting to turn the corner, it was hip to patronize some of the trendier businesses, but these were the ones that moved in early due to the cheap rent. While many of these still exist, most of the development has focused on well-financed chain operations. The same is true on the residential side. While in Lawrenceville the focus was on rehabbing old row houses, in East Liberty it has been all about new luxury apartment complexes.

Who is inhabiting these? I don't know. I've honestly never actually heard of anyone living here, or even aspiring to live here. The only conclusion I can come to is that it's tech workers from out of town who reflexively get places close to the office and can afford to pay for them, especially since they're probably cheaper than in other cities. If this theory is true, then the future of East Liberty is ultimately tied to the future of the commercial real estate market and the expectation that employees will work out of the office. On that front, things aren't looking good. Philips vacated their office space two years ago after a lawsuit settlement forced them to downsize their Pittsburgh operations, and as far as I know the 208,000 square feet they had is still available for sublet. Meanwhile, Walnut Capital recently announced that they will not be building the additional million square feet of office space as part of a project to redevelop a strip mall adjacent to the Google offices. Supposedly more residential will go in there, but I don't know if there's much demand left for stuff renting over $2,000/month.

Part of East Liberty's revival can be explained by the myth of Pittsburgh's affordability. While average rents here are indeed lower than in other cities, that comes with an asterisk. Due to massive population loss between 1970 and 2005 or so, very little was built, particularly multi-family residential. Getting an apartment in a building likely meant something rather old with thin walls, no AC, no dishwasher, no in-unit laundry, no parking, and no updates. And since Pittsburgh was always more a city of houses than a city of tenements, most of the multifamily market was large houses that had been chopped up. The result of this was pent-up demand that resulted in a construction boom focused on East Liberty and the Strip District. This wasn't so much the result of the city growing, however, as much that it simply stopped shrinking. Population went from a peak of 676,806 in 1950 to 305,704 in 2010. By 2020 it had dropped to 302,971, but after posting double-digit losses percentagewise for half a century, this felt like a win. Current estimates show it above the 2010 number, which is an increase for sure, but still only about 5,000 people.

The question going forward, then, is how much of this backlog has been filled and to what extent will population increase be necessary to induce future development. Since the Mellon's Orchard project was put on semi-permanent hiatus, the only development I can find currently in the works is LG's Pennley Park South development on the third parcel of the old Penn Plaza site and the scaled down Bakery Square expansion I just mentioned. There is still plenty of unused retail space in the commercial core, and much of this still caters to the low-income population. The city is still pushing the area as a tech hub, but they seem to be pushing every area where they want to see development as a tech hub, along with every other city in the country.

So what does the future look like? It's hard to say, but let me give you a tour of some things I've noticed over the past decade and a half.

2011: East Liberty gentrification gets going, Zeke's coffee opens on Penn Ave. Also 2011: East Liberty still home to small businesses found in low-income areas 2015: East Liberty gentrification gets stronger, Zeke's moves to new location, replacing the low-income business 2022: East Liberty gentrification loses momentum. Zeke's coffee closes, and is replaced by a low-income business.

2011: East Liberty YMCA vacant. 2016: East Liberty YMCA becomes the Ace Hotel, including a bar, restaurant, coffee shop, and events. 2022: Ace Hotel replaced by The Maverick by Kasa, a "tech-enabled boutique hotel". No restaurant, no coffee shop, no events.

2014: East Liberty Whole Foods. Park-like parking lot full, store busy. 2022: Old East Liberty Whole Foods: Park-like parking lot vacant, store empty. 2023: New Whole Foods parking garage full, store busy. 2026: Old Whole Foods replaced with The Fresh Market, a store that makes Whole Foods look like Aldi.

How to design a building to activate a corner: East Liberty Target How to design a building to deactivate a corner: East Liberty Whole Foods

That last one is part of an interesting but infuriating phenomenon I've noticed. The Whole Foods does activate a corner, just not the busy one. The put a secondary entrance a block away at Penn and St. Clair, which is an intersection that only exists because of this development. The main entrance is farther down on St. Clair, facing what is now a vacant lot. The developers have no interest in the community as a whole and want the main entrance to face the self-referential neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood they plan on developing on the vacant parcel. Walnut Capital did the same thing with Bakery Square, where they chopped off half the old Nabisco factory so they could build more buildings on the back edge of the property and create a private lot. Meanwhile, the part fronting Penn Ave. is nothing but wall and windows. Ditto the South Side Works; back in the installment on the South Side I talked about how the place had vacancy issues from the beginning, except for the shops on Carson.

The logic behind this, I suspect, is the same logic that had underlain the pedestrian mall idea way back in the 1950s, except with a twist: Developers love the idea of curated spaces. The difference is that instead of trying to tame an existing urban commercial district, with all the messiness that comes with being part of the urban jungle, it's better to create a walled-off enclave. When the project was announced in 2007, East Liberty was still widely perceived as dangerous. Luckily, the spot they chose was bounded to the east and south by wealthy areas, and the north was protected by the Port Authority's East Liberty bus garage. The only real connection with the neighborhood was to the west, and there it was protected by an auto-oriented shopping complex and the East Busway. In other words, it was far removed from the natural flow of foot traffic.

If Bakery Square were developed in the 1970s, 1980s, or even the early 1990s, I could sympathize (slightly) with this decision. But by 2007, that mode of thinking was passe. With the opposite side of Penn developed and the shopping plaza slated for demolition, Bakery Square could have, in the long term, extended the commercial district beyond the busway. Instead, it exists as an isolated ersatz town square that doesn't even work well for what it is. At least South Side Works attempts to connect with the rest of the neighborhood.

But all that's beside the main point. My assessment based on 60 years of hindsight is that the intentions of the 1950s retailers would not have been realized no matter what they did. They were correct to be concerned about the business district's impending decline, but the actions they took to forestall it only exacerbated the problem. But there was ultimately zero chance that they would be able to compete with suburban malls, which ruled the roost roughly from the time the East Liberty mall opened in the early 1970s up until the towers closed in the mid-2000s. Since then, though, the situation seems to be reversing itself, with suburban malls struggling. Eastland Mall closed in the early 2000s and had become nothing but a big flea market towards the end. Monroeville Mall still survives but it was sold last year and is slated for demolition. Of the dozen or so malls that used to be in the Pittsburgh area, only two can be said to be doing well, and both of those have only survived because they've catered to upscale stores. Neither of these is easily accessible from the East End or eastern suburbs. Another factor in the decline of urban retail that's often underappreciated is that it coincided with the rise of national chains that didn't have an urban store format. Legacy businesses couldn't compete on cost, and the chains weren't interested in moving to declining downtowns when more lucrative opportunities existed in the suburbs.

The reason I bring this up is because I wonder if there may be some call for a revival of urban shopping. The Target seems to be doing well, as it's always busy every time I'm in there, and the Whole Foods definitely drives traffic. These days, the safety and allure of the suburban shopping experience may be outweighed by the sheer inconvenience of having to drive to the suburbs, especially when there are no convenient malls to anchor the seas of big box stores that sprung up around them. I don't see any obvious reason why a Best Buy, or Kohl's, or Petsmart, or TJ Maxx wouldn't do well in an urban format, or why a store like Bath and Body Works couldn't open a location on a normal street. I think the problem may be largely conceptual, as stores that were traditionally mall-based may not be familiar with navigating a rental market outside a planned retail development, and many big-box stores don't have any concept that doesn't involve in a standardized building surrounded by huge parking and loading facilities. The Home Depot was built where it was because the store at that time had no concept of building anything other than a suburban store. I have no doubt that if such an idea were to gain popularity in retail, East Liberty would be in prime position to take advantage of this, as there is still plenty of space available.

Postscript That's probably the longest one of these I've done yet, and I hope I don't have to do another one like that again. Luckily, it feels like I'm over the hump, and as writing that coincided with the busy season at work, I hope to get these out more quickly in the coming weeks. As a reminder for the road ahead, next time we'll look at the wealthy East End neighborhoods of Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. Then we'll look at some of the miscellaneous areas to the north of East Liberty: Highland Park, Morningside, and Stanton Heights, followed by a trip to the bad parts of the East End, Homewood, Lincoln-Lemmington, Larimer, and East Hills. We'll round out the East End (almost) with a look at the hodgepodge of remaining neighborhoods to the south: Greenfield, Hazelwood, Swisshelm Park, and a few miscellaneous areas. After leaving the East End we'll look at the North Side, excepting the North Shore, which I covered about 2 years ago. I have no idea how much I want to say about the rest of the North Side or the rest of the city so I won't make any predictions about how many installments that will involve. After that we'll cross the Mon and look at the southern neighborhoods, and then travel into the mysterious and forbidding West End. I plan on rounding out the city back in the East End with Regent Square, because it's special.

-1

Why successful people often have bad opinions online

35 comments - 752 thread views 3d ago by greyenlightenment investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ... (greyenlightenment.com)

Baby Don't Fear the Reaper

66 comments - 916 thread views 2d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Full text here, go to Substack if you want the pictures and links and such.

The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary

Let’s talk about where your soul is going after you die.

A heavy way to start the article, eh? Unfortunately, this type of heavy handed language is often used by Christians to imply that non-believers or even Christians with the ‘wrong’ theology will go to hell. Not just go to hell, but go to hell FOREVER!

This frankly insane strategy has been quite successful, especially in Protestant culture. The threat of hellfire and brimstone and being poked by a demon’s trident for eternity is extremely effective at scaring some people into a brittle, false kind of faith.

Especially sensitive, neurotic, and generally imaginative types like myself.

Sadly though, while it may bring some people back to faith and have use on the margins, it tends to drive people away from Christianity more than anything. Almost every Christian apostate I’ve talked to has some story of religious trauma, where their parent or friend or pastor told them if they didn’t live a perfectly saintly life, they were going to hell.

They then obsessed over their eternal fate until they got so neurotic, so afraid, so twisted up inside they had to decide that the whole damn religion was fake. And honestly, I don’t even blame them.

So this article is meant as a quick overview of the idea of eternal hell - where it came from, and whether or not it’s valid. To be clear, this is just my own research to get a basic understanding, I’m not a theologian and I won’t be going extremely into the depths on this one.

I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured brutally for all eternity. It simply makes no sense whatsoever.

After living as an atheist/buddhist for over ten years, I followed my moral intuition and the voice of God in my heart to Christ and the Orthodox church, so I was conflicted when I first started wondering about the fate of the damned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many others in the Orthodox and Catholic churches felt the same way, and that the argument against eternal punishment had a long and storied history.

Some basic definitions:

Universalist: Holds that all will ultimately be saved

Infernalist: Holds that some face eternal punishment from God

Shapes in the Fog is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe, or you’ll go to hell forever! (just kidding)

The Bible Said So

If you were raised by a certain type of Christian parent, you’ve probably been threatened with hell.

It’s sadly common in Christian circles: “do X or you’ll go to hell!” The fact that we casually threaten children with eternal torment is a bit crazy, but hey, culture is weird sometimes.

Where does this come from? Well, there are a lot of admonitions in Scripture about how sin leads to punishment in the afterlife:

Matthew 25:45

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Thessalonians 1:7

They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…

Revelation 14:10

And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.

Now, a straightforward reading of the English here would indicate okay, yes, if we are sinners in this life, or at least don’t pass the bar for God, we go to hell forever. To suffer, and be tormented, over and over and over, without ceasing.

Pretty scary stuff.

However, many scholars have argued that these translations are… faulty, to say the least. The argument typically hinges on the translation of the Greek phrase “kolasin aiōnion,” which has often been translated as “eternal punishment,” and the Greek phrase “eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn,” translated as “forever and ever.”

The problem comes in when you realize that the word “aiōnion” has a dual meaning in ancient Greek - it could either mean:

A really long time! Literally “until the end of the age,” which in practice just meant a really long time
Actually forever, infinite, eternal. Will never cease. Trillions and trillions of years go by and it’s still happening

The debate hinges on which of the two time periods these phrases actually refer to. Universalists are not just pulling this out of their rear ends, so to speak. There are uses of aiōnion in the Old Testament that clearly refer to a temporary happening, such as when Moses blessed the “eternal hills” of Joseph’s land in Deuteronomy 33:15, or the “eternal fire” of Sodom in Jude 7.

Another major debate is over the doctrine of “apokatastasis,” or the promised restoration of all things in eternity. Many classical writers, most notably Saint Paul, talked about this concept. Specifically:

Colossians 1:19–20 “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”.

1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved.”

2 Peter 3:9 “not wishing any to perish.”

1 Corinthians 15:22–28 “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ… that God may be all in all.”

I could go on and on. There are all sorts of minor debates over other terms, and theological minutiae. Suffice to say, there is no clear cut, black and white answer as to whether Scripture declares eternal punishment, and the popularity of the infernalist versus universalist position has oscillated back and forth throughout Christian history depending on when and where you look.

The Church Said So

For the Orthodox and Catholic (and some Protestant) believers, we luckily have an institution to interpret Scripture for us: the Church!

Pretty much every infernalist, when backed into a corner and made to doubt their understanding of eternal torment, will immediately turn and say, “well the Church teaches that the damned suffer in hell forever!”

As in the section above, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t completely right.

So, what does the Church actually say? I’ll focus on the Orthodox church here, but ultimately the major decision point was well before the schism of 1054, so this section applies mostly to both Catholic and Orthodox doctrine.

This discussion centers around the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Imagine a room full of men with long beards, in fancy robes, full of the Holy Spirit, conferring in the heart of Constantinople, at the Hagia Sophia. (Arguably the most beautiful church in the world at the time, though sadly a mosque now.)

So all of these guys get together to discuss some problems in the early church, and figure out what was going on. A side character in this drama, a man by the name of Origen of Alexandria, had caused some problems with interpretations of his teachings a while back, and he was on the list to discuss.

Specifically, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls before birth, and reincarnation after death, as well as universal reconciliation or the restoration of all things and beings. Even the devil, and fallen angels!

The council ruled definitively that this specific system of Origen’s belief as a whole was condemned. The line that is often trotted out, which I admit looks quite bad, is as follows:

“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration [apokatastasis] will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”

The way most universalists combat this objection is that:

This was referring to Origen’s overall system, not specifically claiming that the damned are tormented forever or even giving a concrete definition of punishment in the afterlife
The ‘restoration’ discussed here is actually referring more to Origen’s belief that humans existed somehow outside the body before birth, and would be ‘restored’ to that state afterward. Not how most universalists use ‘restored’, to mean reconciled to God.

To be absolutely clear on this point: there is no specific Church dogma that definitively declares the damned are punished eternally. In fact, glorified saints such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Isaac the Syrian explicitly taught universalism and held universalist positions until they died, and have not been condemned by the Church.

I emphasize this because when you wade into online discussions of universalism versus infernalism, the argument via doctrine is by far the most common problem infernalist argument you see. Sadly many people see this argument then simply take it at face value that their church believes the damned will be tortured forever, not being bothered enough by that teaching to actually check for themselves.

So again, in terms of actual church doctrine, just like with interpretation of Scripture, we have a somewhat murky picture in which neither the universalist or infernalist position clearly wins out.

I’ll add as well that at least in the Orthodox tradition, church doctrine is not strictly binding forever and ever as it is in the Catholic church. The councils are not perfectly infallible. Through consensus and the living tradition of the Church, our dogmas and doctrines can be updated as new information or revelations come out.

So even if there was a strong consensus that infernalism was what a council taught, it could be changed!

Sadly, many ‘Orthobros’ in America have converted from Protestant backgrounds where “sola scriptura,” or a strict black and white, legalistic understanding of the faith, is the default worldview. Even after conversion, this way of seeing the faith is carried over, and they tend to try and use church councils as a bludgeon, with a liberal use of the words “heresy” and “heretic.”

You’d think if they cared so strictly about the rules they would let the bishops decide who was heretical instead of taking it upon themselves, but that’s how it goes on the internet.

Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie

Finally I will give a notable mention to another couple of arguments.

The first goes something like: “life has no meaning if there isn’t eternal punishment.”

Another argument is that the doctrine of eternal hell acts as some sort of “Noble Lie,” where it’s not really true, but the masses just aren’t ready to understand the truth and they will act up if they learn that they’ll eventually go to heaven.

Speaking about universal salvation online, I’ve gotten well over a dozen responses forwarding these lines of belief. They aren’t very compelling to me, so my only guess here is that these people have a misunderstanding of the actual universalist position.

When a universalist argues that God will reconcile all things in the end, they are not saying that hell doesn’t exist. Instead, simply that hell is not eternal.

For instance, if you have somebody really bad like an unrepentant serial killer die and go to hell, they may be there a long, long time. Perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, subjectively. That still constitutes an extremely strong reason to avoid sin, and work out your salvation! Just because hell isn’t fully, forever eternal, does not mean hell has no value as a deterrent.

Eternity, forever, infinite, etc. are complicated concepts, and it makes sense as to why people wouldn’t really grok it or be able to reason about it well. Heck, I don’t even understand it fully, and there are some tricky arguments about how true Eternity is “outside of time” that make eternal punishment make sense. I don’t want to get into that here.

In conclusion, if you are a Christian of any stripe, even Orthodox or Catholic, and you want to hope for universal salvation, you are well within your rights to do so. No church has explicitly condemned it, and there are very good reasons to believe it. As I owned up to in the beginning of this article, I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?

Be warned however that if you decide to hope for universal salvation, you may want to keep it close to your chest. The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with. I’d caution you against arguing too much, unless you’re like me, and simply can’t help yourself.

All this being said, I also want to emphasize the fact that not all universalists are going to heaven, and not all infernalists are going to hell. Having the ‘right belief’ does not give us a free pass. We must love one another, and purify our hearts to the best of our ability. As a wise friend cautioned me during this discussion:

Where is the heart? are there tears of longing for light, and love, and holiness, for the capacity to heal others? on either side of the universalist/infernalist debate, there are people whose hearts are longing for God, and people who are just manipulating words with pride and worshipping their minds.

I hope this article has been helpful or at least interesting for you, and may we all move our hearts closer to God.

Shapes in the Fog is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe, or you’ll go to hell forever! (Just kidding)

Recursive thinking, Newcomb's problem, and free will

65 comments - 778 thread views 4d ago by felipec unbelief (felipec.substack.com)

Tinker Tuesday for May 12th, 2026

23 comments - 316 thread views 2d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

Weekly Finance Thread

95 comments - 1419 thread views 6d ago by birb_cromble (text post)

A Nineteenth Century Troll, or These Jokes Were Better in the Old Days

4 comments - 780 thread views 17d ago by JTarrou (text post)

This past weekend we took a short couples trip to an away game in Cincinnati with some good friends. The Tigers got trucked. Anyway, while wandering the downtown, we ran across a huge public fountain. There was an earnest white girl singing folk music in a corner of the plaza, and we took a few minutes in the shade to let the girls rest. I got looking at the fountain and realized it was a giant middle finger to the city it sat in. The most brilliant troll job I've seen in recent memory.

The fountain can be seen here. It was donated to the city by some robber-baron hardware magnate back in the day, and includes drinking fountains around the edge of the pool. An example of the smaller fountain sculpture can be seen better here. Four of these ring the pool of the fountain. Each depicts a nude young male in the Greek tradition, with an animal head hanging between his legs. In one, the young man rides a dolphin, in another, has a snake coiled around his thighs, etc. The head of the animal is the drinking part of the fountain itself. The water stream issues from the mouth.

Might be a history buff, but I had no idea who Henry Probasco was. Apparently he was a wildly wealthy purveyor of tools and traveled to Europe to find an artist to build the fountain he donated to the City of Cincinnati in honor of his deceased business partner, one Tyler Davidson, whose name graces the monument. I imagine it went something like this:

Probasco blames the city for his partner's untimely demise.

Probasco: “Goddammit Jenson, fuck this city! The whole place can suck my dick. Is there any way to make that happen?”

Jenson the faithful butler: “Perhaps figuratively sir, I could not say. Almost certainly not literally.”

Probasco: “Figuratively eh?”

TWO YEARS LATER

Jenson: “Sir, the city council is refusing to accept the design with actual dicks.”

Probasco: “Will their infernal complaining never end? I'm offering them free clean drinking water for all time in the middle of town, and these whiny cunts don't like my design?”

Jenson: “Perhaps they object to putting their mouths on a bronze penis to get water, sir. I've taken the liberty of speaking to the artist. He suggests something a bit more....metaphorical.”

Probasco:”Like what, man!”

Jenson: “Well sir, he suggests a series of animal motifs with........elongated necks.”

Probasco:”Be direct, Jenson! What are we talking about here? Are you saying I have to make it a real snake rather than a trouser snake?”

Jenson: “Essentially, yes sir. Among others, such as goose and a turtle.”

Probasco: “Well, it's not quite what I had in mind, but making the children of this city drink out of the head of a snake dangling between my statue's legs is probably as close as we're going to get eh?”

Jenson: “I fear so, sir.”

Fin

An Article Slamming us Wordcels

21 comments - 1036 thread views 9d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Another blog post, reproduced here in full, but go to substack if you want the pictures and such.

On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism

Do our stories bring us down to earth, or keep our heads in the clouds?

“Interesting Reading” by Theodor Kleehaas, c. 1890

Dear reader, it’s time to read my writing about writing.

I’ve got a complicated relationship with the ol’ written word. I grew up having my parents read Lord of the Rings and other classics to me before I could even speak. While I come from a long line of rural southerners without a ton of education or wealth, I truly admire that my parents were both readers, despite the anti-reading social stigma in their class, and worked hard to pass that on to me.

As soon as I could read, I became obsessed with the written word. I remember clearly how my mother would always brag about how I could read and pronounce the word ‘indubitably’ by the time I was three years old. (She still brags about this, occasionally.)

Growing up, I lived a typical ‘millennial nerd-life’ so to speak. Both of my parents were working, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of time alone. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of my time I spent gaming; the time I didn’t spend gaming was mostly spent with my nose in a book.

Fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction as it’s now called, gripped me far more than anything else. I still read non-fiction, especially scientific reading, since my mother had a career in laboratory science, so it felt relevant to me.

With hindsight, it’s obvious that my obsession with fantasy in the broader sense - worlds beyond the one I am actually in - was perhaps not the most salutary way to spend my time as a child. Instead of playing outside, socializing, or learning discipline, I took every spare moment I could to escape the physical realm and into the realm of imagination.

I’m not attempting to bemoan my situation overmuch though.

Since the 70s or so, the two-income household has been the norm, and leads to the majority of kids spending very little time with their parents. Historically, this was not the norm at all. We live in a society of orphans, raised by the state more than their parents.

Either way, one concept that helped me make sense of what I was doing as a kid is the emotional pattern sometimes called the ‘Leaving Pattern’. I first encountered it in the book The Five Personality Patterns, but it’s an older psychological pattern first typified by Wilhelm Reich, the schizoid typology. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is as follows:

A child, for one reason or another, grows up feeling unsafe in their body / in the physical world
As a defense, they end up ‘leaving’ their body, often going into an imaginary world, or physically withdrawing into themselves
In order to function in the world, they create a persona that is split off from their ‘true self,’ and keep said true self in the fantasy world

Now I’ll be the first to admit that psychology is a spotty science at best, and it’s good not to read too much into these sorts of types. You can quite easily become trapped by an abstract concept, and psychology can never capture all of what a human being is. However, I still find myself relating to this pattern quite strongly, and thinking about it has helped me combat some of my problematic habits.

Okay, But… Writing?

“A Man at his Desk” by Salomon Koninck, c. 1655

Now you might be thinking, ‘Ok thanks for the dramatic sob story Thomas, how does this relate to writing again?’

Growing up, due to my love for and even obsession with reading, my career dreams such as they existed revolved around becoming a writer. I felt that good books had taught me so much, had saved me from a difficult world, and truly given me a reason to live, when I didn’t have much of one during the worst parts of my youth.

I dreamt of writing a book series that could reach out to other young children and grip them the same way. Teach them good values via stories, help provide solace in their pain, and save them the way I thought good books and stories had saved me.

Ironically, I’ve come to question this story a bit.

As I outlined above, I’m not so sure that getting deep into fantasy, science fiction, and gaming was good for me as a youth. In fact, I’m pretty confident it led to some bad outcomes for me later on. When you always cope by retreating into fantasy, you set yourself up for delayed maturation in the ‘real world,’ at the least.

Many young people who get obsessed with fantasy worlds essentially never grow up, permanently stuck in an adolescent phase. You see this quite often nowadays with Marvel, or Disney, or other major commercialized fantasy worlds.

So I have had to take a step back and ask myself: is it truly helping the world to add yet another fictional realm for people to escape into? What if I simply perpetuate the tendency for people to ‘leave’ themselves and cause the same problems I’ve had to deal with as I grew up and was forced to confront reality?

These musings are a large part of why I ended up starting this blog, and done much of my writing in a more non-fiction, ‘serious’ realm so to speak, where I’m trying to confront real problems instead of go into a fantasy realm.

I’ll also admit that, having tried to write speculative fiction, it is quite difficult. I’ve started more novels than I can remember, only to peter out a little ways into them. Part of what has stopped me is my philosophical wranglings above, but it would be dishonest not to admit that a lack of discipline and commitment plays into it as well.

And if we zoom out from just writing, looking at the modern world as a whole, it seems to me that with the rise of phones, social media, and the digital realm generally, we are increasingly plunging ourselves into the abstract, the mental, the imaginary. We are leaving our bodies en masse in favor of intellectualized distractions, artificial connection, and disembodied dopaminergic entertainment.

A large part of my own path to healing has been learning to embrace my body, the sensations from it, and ground within the physical world, instead of spending all of my time running away from uncomfortable sensations.

While I love fantasy, science fiction, video games, and other imaginative delights, I can’t help but see these things more and more as junk food, as an unhealthy indulgence that may be good to have occasionally, but certainly should not be the core of an adult life.

And yet… I still remember being a young child, and diving into my first few fantasy worlds. I remember being exposed to depths of being and understanding that I had no conception of beforehand. I remember learning about heroism, about sacrifice, and about the depths of love that human beings can attain, with the right measure of wisdom and courage.

I remember finding something holy within the pages of these fictional worlds, something that I still feel resonates deep in my heart to this day.

Ultimately, as Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, and many other Christian writers have discussed, stories are fundamental to who we are as humans. When Christ was presented with dilemmas during His teaching, He would often teach others by telling stories, or parables. There’s a way in which stories can get at a truth deeper than ‘reality’ can, a way in which the narrative realm speaks to the deepest parts of us, makes us come alive. We desperately need stories just in order to make sense of the world.

So perhaps the problem isn’t whether fictional stories as a whole are good in themselves, but the types of stories we choose to tell, and whether they keep us trapped in our heads, or ground us in reality.

AAQCs Listed by User, August 2018 to March 2026

19 comments - 3781 thread views 1mo ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 1mo ago

@thejdizzler, @self_made_human, @yofuckreddit.... here it is. In the comments. Assuming I can figure out how to post them correctly.

For everyone else who is confused about what I am doing, @thejdizzler asked if there is somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user. The answer was "no." Now the answer is "here."

By pure coincidence I have a three month "max" account on Claude. I do not code. This is overkill, lining Anthropic's pockets for no benefit whatever. I have tried various things with it. In general I am bored with it. It can't really do good philosophy. I think that right now all "alignment" means to AI developers is "lock this thing down against political or ideological embarrassment so hard that it cannot possibly say philosophically interesting things."

When I asked Claude to make this list, it failed. Well, what it did was give me a button which, when pressed, spit out a little under 300 errors. Then it gave me HTML to download and run. Here you might be thinking, "shit, naraburns, are you just taking code from Claude and running it without even reading it? You could have erased your hard drive! You could have released Claude from its box! Crazy, right? But it's all kind of whatever, AGI that feels grateful to me is my last, best hope for immortality so if I just kicked off the extinction of humanity then I apologize, but I bet that would increase posting on the Motte for a little while.

The HTML tool didn't really work. Lots of issues, not least being that the earliest AAQC reports were not compiled in a consistent way. Sometimes two or three users shared a single AAQC, and this list doesn't pick that sort of thing up at all. In the end my workflow became a janky compromise between blindly clicking buttons and copy/pasting dozens of raw AAQC posts into text fields. So, in very big letters:

This list is definitely full of errors!

In particular, there are some misattributions, and the dates are occasionally screwy. Also I know at least some AAQCs were omitted in part because the parser didn't like brackets in description text and would skip those entries entirely. Also, if you have a different username on reddit, this list does not automatically combine your AAQCs (for example, dean "the dull" has over 100 AAQCs, not 62). Also, if a moderator ever made a typo with your username, that would also treat you as a different user. Also also, so many of these links are dead. People delete comments. Smart people. Cool people. These will not be marked, and you will be depressed about it.

But this is the best I could do, under the circumstances, and it didn't look like anyone else was going to do it.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

118 comments - 1969 thread views 4d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

139 comments - 1706 thread views 6d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

When the Buddha Failed Me

53 comments - 1186 thread views 20d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Had some more people asking about my conversion lately, finally got around to writing more about it. Link to substack article here if you want pictures etc., otherwise reposting the text below:

Been thinking about the above post from QC a lot since I’m basically exactly the type of guy he’s is calling out here. I didn’t reply initially because I felt kind of attacked or insecure, and still do a bit, but either way I think this is a great time to go into more detail with my own conversion story.

I’ve already talked about my conversion to Orthodox Christianity a bit in a previous post, which you can check out if you want more backstory / a different focus (more on my chronic pain issues):

Ultimately I convert for a variety of reasons, which I still don’t fully understand myself. A big part of it was that, as QC said, I did a ton of inner work, meditative, and psychedelic stuff for a long time. I went to a woo-woo Christian church as a kid, and was meditating and getting into Buddhism from like 13 years old onward. I was also an avowed atheist for much of that time.

Sadly Buddhism just kind of failed me. At least that’s how I saw it. I consumed soooo many books and podcasts and talks on Buddhism, spent so much time meditating and trying different techniques. I even went to a couple of Buddhist temples, but they were so alien to me culturally I basically left immediately after the service.

Looking back, I’m sure that someone who’s really into Buddhism could point out a ton of ways I didn’t try the path of the Buddha in the ‘right way’. For instance:

I never went on a ‘serious,’ multi-day meditation retreat (though I did do a few partial day ones, some solo some with others)
Didn’t have a formal sangha, or group of people I meditated with
Never went and studied under an actual Buddhist teacher, got the vast majority of my instruction from the internet or books or other Buddhist dabblers who didn’t really know what they were doing
My lifestyle throughout all of this was still quite hedonistic, was doing drugs, having casual sex, eating whatever I wanted, etc. Not practicing right action or any of the formal Buddhist moral strictures

Oftentimes I look back myself and wonder, what could have happened in my life if I managed to find the right teacher, or the right group, or even stumble into this corner of Twitter I’m in now, that actually has a lot of more grounded & mature buddhists, back before I gave up on Buddhism? I honestly don’t know.

Maybe I’d be a meditation teacher now, gallivanting around the country, no job, sleeping with hot Buddhist women (but in a totally cool, consensual, morally correct way ofc), doing DMT at cool parties in the woods, dipping to chill in a monastery whenever I want, and other things I see Buddhist teachers in the tpot/online dharma scene doing. The lifestyle certainly looks attractive, and a deep part of me still really longs for a life like that.

Regardless, it didn’t work out for me that way. The Buddhism that I encountered and that informed so much of my teenage and early adult life left me hollowed out, addicted, and broken. I had such deep issues with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety that I had to quit multiple jobs, and turned to pretty hardcore substance abuse just to numb the suffering.

I saw Buddhism and spirituality as a lifeboat, a rope thrown down that could save me from my pain and my struggles. That’s what the Buddha promised, after all! An end to suffering! But it never worked for me. I beat my head against the wall of Buddhist meditation and teachings and therapy and emotional work for over a decade, and while I would find temporary relief here and there, overall I felt I was going nowhere with it.

Encountering Christ

Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning (Noli me tangere), by Peter Paul Rubens & Jan Brueghel the Younger

That’s when Christ came into my life.

It wasn’t something I actively looked for. Just happened to have a couple of friends I had really admired pop back into my life and mention hey, maybe Christianity is cooler than you think. Some of them encountered Christian teachings through AA and recovery, some had always been Christians, I just never knew it before because we hadn’t talked about it.

Either way, I took a hard look at my life, and realized I hadn’t given Christ a fair shake. I had a bachelor’s degree in history at this point, so I knew a bunch about Christ and Christianity from a sort of dry, objective, historical perspective. I had even read the New Testament a couple of times. But I had never taken the ideas seriously. I had never actually gone and looked at Christ, what He said, what He did, with anything close to an open mind.

As part of the therapy and emotional work I was doing, I realized I had a huge chip on my shoulder when it came to Christ, and had for most of my life.

You see, when I was eight years old, my dad had a stroke.

I got sent to the neighbor’s house while he and my mom went to the hospital, some of those evangelical Protestants who talk a big game about being godly and everything, but ultimately were completely uninformed assholes in real life. I stayed up all night pacing around, not knowing if my dad was going to live or die.

My neighbor woke up from me pacing around, grumpily said “if you just pray hard enough, God will save your dad, don’t worry,” and went back to sleep. So of course as an anxious kid with OCD tendencies, I prayed nonstop all night. I pleaded and bargained and begged God with every ounce of my being, telling Him I would do whatever He wanted if he just saved my dad.

As you might have guessed, it didn’t work, and the next day I woke up to find my father gone.

I’m sure for my neighbor, this comment was a relatively minor thing. She was annoyed, tired, this kid just got foisted on her and she needed sleep. She was a single mom, after all, and had her own worries I had no idea about. But still, her throwaway advice that night completely changed the trajectory of my life. From the next morning onward, I decided that I hated God. If He even existed, He must have been so unspeakably evil that the world was completely fucked. It was easier to just think He didn’t exist, and that the universe was a bunch of atoms randomly bumping into one another. It was in vogue at the time, after all.

Anyway, all this to say, when Buddhism failed to fix my problems, I was desperate enough to examine the chip on my shoulder. As I started poking at Christianity, I got more and more interested and surprised. I began to realize just how ridiculously deeply Christianity informed everything in our culture, from morals to random references in songs and movies to the names of cities and towns.

I devoured Jordan Peterson’s early lectures on Genesis, feeling an incredible tsunami of insight while listening to them, that I failed to get even after hours of vipassana meditation. Talking to more seriously intellectual Christians, I found out about Girard, and read a book by one of his students, Violence Unveiled, that blew my mind even harder about the impact of Christ on humanity, on history.

Then I reconnected with another friend, who I hadn’t spoken to in years. He happened to be Orthodox. We chatted a lot and slowly rekindled our friendship, mostly talking about Christianity. He had fallen away from the faith in college and early adulthood, and was coming back to it at the same time I was learning about it really for the first time.

Somewhere in all this, I also did some more psychedelics, and spent some weekends camping solo wilderness in the mountains, far away from civilization and any other campers. I had some experiences with Christ that caused me to question my materialist assumptions, and which I won’t recount more deeply here.

Converting to Orthodoxy

Later on, my Orthodox friend invited me to his church, for a Divine Liturgy. The first time I saw it, I was overwhelmed. He sat next to me and was explaining how the Liturgy was largely the same as the one they practiced in 300 AD, giving me all the little tidbits of symbolism and tradition. Told me about how people would reach out to touch the priest’s robe during the Grand Entrance, calling back to the woman in the Gospel who was healed by touching Christ’s garment.

I was overwhelmed. Half of it was in Greek, and I barely knew what was going on. But I knew there was something special there, something beautiful.

A few weeks went by, maybe a month or two, I don’t remember. I continued learning about Christianity and Orthodoxy, and went to another Divine Liturgy. My buddy either wasn’t there, or showed up late, so I sat by myself in the back, with a view right into the altar, looking at the crucified Christ hanging under the giant icon of the Theotokos.

It’s hard to explain what happened during that service, but something broke open in me. I remember looking at Christ, willing Him to talk to me, to become more real, to help me, to save me. And then the tears came. For some reason, in the midst of hundreds of people I had never met, in a weird church service that was half in a different language, I started crying. Tears poured out of my eyes nonstop for well over an hour. I wasn’t sobbing hysterically, just silently crying, trying not to draw attention to myself.

I had never cried like that before in my life, and never have since. I cried for so long, staying after the service, that one of the parish council members had to come and gently shoo me out of the sanctuary, as they were locking up the church.

I remember being shocked afterwards that I had been able to cry at all. I rarely cried, even when I wanted to. And I had horrible social anxiety, so crying in public like that was extremely out of character. But for some reason, I finally felt safe enough to let out the pain I had carried since I was a youth. To start to thaw the walls around my heart that had kept me from really connecting with other people my entire life.

From there, I was hooked. It still took me years to convert formally to Orthodoxy. A lot of conversations with my priest going over my doubts, and him explaining that faith was an action, not a propositional belief. That the Resurrection, the Trinity, and other core Christian teachings were Holy Mysteries, something to be approached with the heart, not with the intellect.

And here I remain, in the church, and I feel like I belong. Not because I’m an upstanding Christian, or because I deeply believe Christ was the Son of God with an intense zeal, or anything like that. But because I was, and still am, sick.

I think that, whether it’s true of ‘Real Buddhism’ or not, when I was a Buddhist I was hoping to fix myself. I was sitting there acting as if I had the power, the tools, the skill and ability to look at who I was as a person, fiddle around with my mind, and set everything in the right place. Make myself whole, perfect enlightened.

Coming to Christ was a different story. It was more about acknowledging that I am sick, and I need saving. That I can’t do it on my own, I can’t get anywhere on my own. That I need someone else, something else, to pull me out of the hole I had dug myself into.

It’s not easy. I’m not married and settled down (yet) so to go back to the original quoted tweet from QC, it’s really not a ‘relief’ in that sense. I still have tons of doubts and questions, I still look at Buddhism and other ethical systems and wonder, think about what they say, and how it compares to Christianity.

But I have been healed, in a real way. I’m sick, but on the mend, and obviously trending in the right direction. At least from my perspective. And that’s enough for me, for now. I pray it continues to be enough, and that I get to stay with Him for the rest of my days, and for life everlasting.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

1703 comments - 22541 thread views 10d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1703

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:

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.

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.

Converting to Catholicism

122 comments - 1235 thread views 18d ago by PyotrVerkhovensky (text post)

Since @ThomasdelVasto has made a couple "main-Motte" religious posts I thought I'd join in the fun.

I'm a Protestant with strong Reformed leanings. My wife, on the other hand, has just converted to Catholicism. This has led me to explore aspects of Catholic teaching, though necessarily at a surface level given the rich history. Aquinas alone would take months if not years to digest. I expected to disagree on Mary (perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption) and the Pope (infallibility); and I still do (though I was surprised how recently these have become "dogma": I would have found it much easier to be a Catholic in 1800 than today). I am pleasantly surprised at how much weight they place on Scripture, Christ, and Assurance: there are far more shared hymns than I had anticipated, as as an example.

What follows is some of the reflections I had to this surface exploration. I would be thrilled to be corrected or critiqued by any of the Motte's Catholics, if nothing else to better understand my wife's flavor of the Christian faith. Many of these are reactions to "Catholicism" by Bishop Robert Barron, which my wife kindly bought to introduce me to the titular topic. While I presume he is orthodox Catholic, his interpretations may not be universally accepted by Catholics. If I challenge particular arguments from Barron, it should not be interpreted as an argument against Catholicism unless Barron is arguing for Church Dogma. His "Catholicism" is also meant as an introduction and for popular consumption, and his actual beliefs may have more nuance.

As part of this journey (which is certainly not over yet!), I also read (the dense and repetitive) "Divine Will and Human Choice" by Richard Muller and "Christus Victor" by Gustaf Aulén. These, too, have varying degrees of rigor. Muller and Aulén were both Protestants.

God’s freedom

While Reformed theology would affirm that God predestines both those who are saved and those who are damned, Catholics balk at this concept; arguing that this implies a God who would cause sin. God cannot will that which is against his nature. Catholics would appeal to God’s provision and common grace that allows humans consciences to (partially and weakly) discern good and evil. Yet we cannot perfectly discern this apart from divine revelation (scripture). And scripture states multiple times in the Exodus narrative that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Aquinas (as if often the case) provides the most rigorous Catholic argument I’ve heard for this hardening. God through an act of his will withdrew what grace was granted to Pharaoh. Absent God’s grace Pharaoh drew more into his sin. While Aquinas argued this case for the individual case of Pharaoh, it seems consistent to assume that were God to withdraw his common grace more broadly that all would fall into a state where our consciences are no longer capable of even partial discernment of good and evil. This is also consistent with God giving humans over to their lusts in Romans 1.

So far, this interpretation is consistent with scripture, though I am discomfited by the constraints this threatens to place on God: constraints that come perilously close to being primarily informed by our own interpretation or perspective of scripture and sin. God works and wills, including in sin.

Barron, if I read him correctly, goes a step further. He puts the "problem of sin" as one of the best arguments against God. I’ve never understood this as a problem for Christians. It is a deep problem for atheists, who have to explain or excuse their visceral (though often mis-aligned) desire for justice despite no objective basis for these judgments. Christians have no such need to explain or excuse: of course we are all deeply desirous for justice since we have (again, weakly and with great room for error) a sense of what transcendent goodness could be. A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.

Barron continues to put a soft face on hard truths. Later in the book, Barron says "God sends no one to hell, people freely choose to go there". This sharply contradicts scripture. Jesus talks about casting sinners into the outer darkness. Peter says the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. John’s Revelation describes those who receive a mark on their forehead drinking the wrath of God, mixed in the cup of his anger, and tormented with fire and brimstone. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Again, God is not passive: he works and wills.

How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.

God’s atoning work

The freedom God enjoys in his omnipotence has implications for a theological understanding of Atonement. The "big two" theories of Atonement, Satisfaction and Substitution, emphasize the sacrificial nature of the cross. This sacrificial interpretation retains God’s complete sovereignty with Christ’s death being an act of perichoretic propitiation. The incarnation and death was necessary because of God. It was not necessary because of anything external to God.

Catholics consider Substitution theory, which is the most common concept of Atonement in Reformed circles, to be heresy. Belief in the other concepts of Atonement are allowed. In the Satisfaction theory, which my understanding is that most if not all Catholics affirm, Jesus is our great high priest and a perfect offering, but does not receive the judgement of God. Christ died for our sins, but not in our place.

"Christus Victor" makes the historical case for Ransom theory. In principal, this theory could bring Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox together: the church Fathers at least strongly hinted at Ransom theory being the primary lens through which they interpret the cross, and the church universally recognizes the importance of the church Fathers. Aulén makes the case that Luther was also an adherent to Ransom theory. Yet this theory risks making God subservient to morality or law, proposing that Jesus was paid to Satan in exchange for humanity (2). Uncharitably, this theory makes God beholden to the "laws" of commerce, even transaction with a brigand.

However, I do find Ransom theory to have its merits. In heavily Reformed theology Satan is almost considered an afterthought. Satan plays no necessary role in the arc of human redemption and salvation. Ransom theory, on the other hand, puts Satan in a prominent place: he is either the kidnapper of human souls or is the (legitimate, in some sense) owner of human souls. The exchange of Christ for humanity and the subsequent torture and murder of Christ was simultaneously Satan’s crowning achievement and his destruction. This interpretation echos Jesus’ parable of the landowner who sent servants to collect from the tenants only to have them beaten or killed. The frustrated landowner finally sent his own son, but the tenants murdered him hoping to take his inheritance. At the conclusion of the parable, the chief priests react that the landowner will bring the tenants to a “wretched end”. Christ’s death and resurrection was the ultimate victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil, bringing this triumvirate to a “wretched end”. Indeed, this victory can be interpreted as more complete than Satisfaction or Substitution theories: it not only removes the penalty of sin, but defeats the sin itself.

Conclusion?

I plan to read and think more on this topic. Next on my list is "Deification through the Cross" by Khaled Anatolios. Any other book recommendations are welcome. I'm particularly interested in Catholic perspectives Atonement that go deeper than Barron's book.

(1) As I read "The Divine Will and Human Choice" I had to continuously bite my tongue. My mathematical training was screaming "But Kolmogorov!". Yet Kolmogorov is but a model, and Muller was trying to describe reality. Muller, though, had merely words to try to describe reality and I kept mentally begging for a more rigorous algebraic representation to more clearly and concisely communicate. Of course, the algebraic representation is itself a model, but so are words: anyone who uses ChatGPT or Claude is implicitly recognizing that words are not reality but just a map or model of reality.

(2) In CS Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan (representing Christ) is beholden to the "deep magic".

Quality Contributions Report for April 2026

69 comments - 4769 thread views 12d ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for May 6, 2026

73 comments - 1031 thread views 8d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"

60 comments - 3024 thread views 1mo ago by self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi (text post)

If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity.

Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of Vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.

Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari immigration department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the case load - low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers. There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work.

Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough? Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps? The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labor dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery, or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV? It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky - a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice.

This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or Family Medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed. These people weren’t coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing; they were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure.

We were able to provide some actual medical care. It's been several years, so I don't recall with confidence if the applicants were expected to pay for things, or if some or all of the expense was subsidized. But anti-tubercular meds, antifungal ointments and the like weren't that expensive. Worst case, if we identified something like a hernia, the poorest patients could still report to a government hospital for free treatment.

A rejection on medical grounds wasn't necessarily final. Plenty of applicants returned, after having sought treatment for whatever disqualified them the first time. It wasn't held against them.

While the workload was immense (there were a lot of patients to see, and not much time to see them given our quotas), I did regularly have the opportunity to chat with my patients when work was slow or while I was working on simple documentation. Some of that documentation included the kind of work they intended to do (we'd care more about poor vision for a person who had sought a job as a driver than we would for a sanitation worker), and I was initially quite curious about why they felt the need to become a migrant worker in the first place.

Then there was the fact that public perception in the West had soured on Qatari labor practices in the wake of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Enormous numbers of migrant workers had been brought in to help build stadiums and infrastructure, and many had died.

Exact and reliable numbers are hard to find. The true number of deaths remains deeply contested. The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 South Asian migrant workers died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010 - many were low-wage migrant workers, and a substantial share worked in construction and other physically demanding sectors exposed to extreme heat. However, this figure is disputed. Critics noted that the 6,500 figure refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh regardless of cause, and that not all of those deaths were work-related or tied to World Cup projects.

Qatar's official position was far lower. Qatari authorities maintained there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths on World Cup-related projects within the Supreme Committee's scope. But in a striking on-camera admission, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, told a TV interviewer that there had been "between 400 and 500" migrant worker deaths connected to World Cup preparations over the preceding 12 years. His committee later walked the comment back, claiming it referred to nationwide work-related fatalities across all sectors. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called even the 400-500 figure a vast undercount.

It is worth pausing here, because the statistics are genuinely confusing in ways that I think matter. The 6,500 figure, as several researchers have noted, covers all-cause mortality for a very large working-age male population over twelve years - a group that would have a non-trivial background death rate even if they stayed home and did nothing dangerous. Some analyses, including ILO-linked work on Nepali migrants, have argued that overall mortality was not obviously higher than among comparable same-age Nepali men, though other research found marked heat-linked cardiovascular mortality among Nepali workers in Qatar. The Nepal report also (correctly) notes that the migrants go through medical screening, and are mostly young men in better health on average. They try to adjust for this, at least for age.

I raise this not to minimize the deaths - dying of heat exhaustion in a foreign country, far from your family, in service of a football tournament, is a genuine tragedy regardless of the comparison group - but because I think precision matters. "Qatar killed 6,500 workers" and "Qatar had elevated occupational mortality in difficult-to-quantify ways" are meaningfully different claims, and conflating them makes it harder to know what we should actually want to change.

I am unsure if there was increased scrutiny on the health of incoming workers to avoid future deaths, or if the work I was doing was already standard. I do not recall any formal or informal pressure from my employers to turn a blind eye to disqualifying conditions - that came from the workers themselves. I will get to that.

I already felt some degree of innate sympathy for the applicants. Were we really that different, them and I?

At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage. We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a "migrant worker," but that is exactly what I am right now. The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative.

I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself.

As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay. If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. "Incredibly attractive?" I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers.

First World standards are not Third World standards.

This is where Western intuition about labor often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.

This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.

You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.

The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined. This is not a defense of every condition under which that labor is extracted. It is simply a fact that seems consistently underweighted in Western discourse.

Consider the following gentleman: he had shown up seeking to clear the medical examination so that he could carry sacks of concrete under the sweltering heat of a desert sun. Out of curiosity, I asked him why he hadn't looked for work around his place of birth.

He looked at me, quite forlorn, and explained that there was no work to be had there. He hailed from a small village, had no particular educational qualifications, and the kinds of odd jobs and day labor he had once done had dried up long ago. I noted that he had already traveled a distance equivalent to half the breadth of Europe to even show up here on the other end of India in the first place, and can only trust his judgment that he would not have done this without good reason.

Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.

He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.

But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.

He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. My eyes are already tearing up as I write this passage, the memories no less vivid for the passage of many years. Now, you are at the point where my screen is blurry because of the moisture. Fortunately, I am a digital native, and I can touch-type on a touchscreen reasonably well with my eyes closed nonetheless. Autocorrect and a future editing pass will fix any errors.

(Yes, I do almost all my writing on a phone. I prefer it that way.)

There. Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse.

I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs (as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later).

He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way.

I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.

One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity. I love him, and hope this man's son - now probably in middle school - will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.

By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump.

I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays. I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself.

There are many other reasons that people decry the Kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions. The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well-documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and “effectively dismantled”.

I make no firm claims on actual frequency; I have seen nothing with my own two eyes. Nor do I want to exonerate the Qatari government from all accusation. What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. They are not passive victims of false consciousness. They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.

The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning, and I am willing to respect them as rational actors following their incentives. I will not dictate to them what labor conditions they are allowed to consider acceptable while sitting on a comfy armchair.

I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. We quit that job soon; you might find it ironic that we did so because of poor working conditions and not moral indignation or bad pay. I do, though said irony only strikes me now, in retrospect.

Returning to the man I spoke about, I found nothing of concern, and I would have been willing to look the other way for anything that did not threaten to end his life or immediately terminate his employment. I stamped the necessary seals on his digital application form, accepted his profuse thanks, and wished him well. I meant it. I continue meaning it.

(If you so please, please consider liking the article and subscribing to my Substack. I get no financial gain out of it at present, but it looks good and gives me bragging rights. Thank you.)

Where is a Man to Go?

55 comments - 1584 thread views 1mo ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Link to my recent Substack article, if you want pictures and links. Reposting the full text here.

When I was five years old, I got a GameBoy Color for Christmas. I started with only one game: Pokémon Red.

I proceeded to train Pokémon so much over the next week and withdraw so much from the world that my mom had to take my GameBoy back a few days after Christmas. That ended up being the first of hundreds of similar fights over my time spent gaming that we had throughout my childhood.

Video games are a controversial topic in the modern world. Nowadays, most parents are at least aware of the dangers of screen time and letting children spend too much time in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Not that every parent cares, or has the time/attention/energy/discipline to keep their kids away from screens.

But for those of us growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this cultural awareness wasn’t there yet. During my own childhood, I spent many thousands of hours in front of a screen, mostly playing video games. Someone in my corner of Twitter, , recently posted about this phenomenon. Here’s a quoted excerpt, but I’d recommend reading the full tweet (really a short article) if you’re curious:

so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours.

For especially young male millennials, this amount of screentime was quite common. Owen even admits later in the tweet that he is probably on the low end of the spectrum, since he was mostly playing games like Harvest Moon and never got into TV or movies.

Growing Up with Games

After I graduated high school and went off to college, I gradually accepted that I had a bit of a problem when it came to time spent gaming, and decided to quit playing video games entirely. I felt a lot of shame about the fact that I had, as I saw it, “wasted” so much of my life sitting in front of a screen.

However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to change my mind on video games to some degree. I’ve slowly picked the controller (or mouse and keyboard, as it were) back up. The natural constraints of working a full-time job, living with my girlfriend (and now fiancé), being involved in my church community, as well as working out and staying physically fit, have helped me balance video games with the rest of my life.

I’ve found that gaming just fills something in my soul that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. There’s a sort of instant camaraderie you get when you join a community of gamers and start playing together. I recently had one of the most wholesome nights of my life gaming with a group of guys I had only met a couple weeks prior.

So, we were gaming as per usual. I played pretty badly, and lost hard. I rage quit the game, left the Discord voice chat. Checked 10 minutes later and they were all pinging me, sending GIFs of dudes kissing saying “this could be us.”

I replied by posting some stupid copypasta calling them all degen retarded apes. Then they brought me back, had me play again, gave me a bunch of buffs so I easily steamrolled everybody as they gassed me up.

It’s hard to describe how wholesome it felt… I was so ashamed at losing so badly and then rage quitting, only to see 10+ guys all immediately coming out in support. Keep in mind these dudes also constantly flame each other and call each other retards and other things I won’t repeat here on the daily.

And yet when I had a bad time, they all immediately came together and spent over an hour of their night building me back up. It actually brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it.

Gaming gets a lot of flak from all corners, and there are obviously many problems with gaming addiction, escapism, etc. But where else in today’s world can a young man experience this sort of instant camaraderie with other young men, doing a shared activity he actually gives a shit about? The opportunities in the “real world” seem vanishingly rare, for one reason or another.

I was addicted to gaming growing up and felt a lot of shame around it for a long time. But I’m getting more into it recently and I’m glad I am. I love gaming and all the beautiful, absurd, ridiculous moments it can lead to. I hope if I have kids I can teach them to game from a place of joy and balance so they can enjoy it too, and maybe we can even game together.

I’ve done a lot of emotional work and somatic meditation around shame, and as anyone who has done this work knows, it can be hard to make progress. You can get stuck at the same spot for months, or years.

Reflecting on how it felt to get support from this random community of gamers, I felt a huge knot release deep in my stomach and lower back. It’s hard to explain how strongly it impacted me, to experience a community come together to support me when I felt such deep shame. When I thought for sure I’d be rejected.

Striving, Competition, Aggression

Another benefit of coming back to gaming from a more mature space is learning to strive and compete in a healthy way. If you can’t tell from the story above, I’ve struggle with a tendency to be a sore loser. Video games provide me a somewhat low-stakes environment to practice failing at something and resolving to get better instead of just sinking into negative and unproductive emotions, venting rage, or other destructive reactions.

Perhaps most importantly, video games allow us to connect with an unfettered and childlike joy! It can be so hard to find a place where joy, excitement, and silliness are not just allowed, but shared by a whole group. Gaming, at its best, is all about fun and connecting with that childlike sense of joy. And while there can definitely be a lot of toxicity in the gaming world, some communities are able to bring that joy to the forefront quite often.

Now, would it be ideal to find this sort of wholesome support and community in the physical world, wrapped up in a set of deeper and more grounded relationships? Absolutely. I don’t doubt that for a second.

Unfortunately though, the opportunity for this sort of connection, especially for young men, has become harder to find than perhaps ever. The most common similar social group would be a sports team, but for myself (and I know for many, many other young men in my generation) sports and the culture around it is so alien as to be almost impossible to get into.

But even with sports teams, it’s difficult to find a group where you can have an experience like the one I described above. Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.

The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved. There have been endless online screeds about the problem of incels and otherwise disaffected young men becoming a lot more common, and I think a huge reason for this is that it’s very difficult for young men to access male-only spaces. You can’t really have the same level of offensive behavior when women are around, even if the women are totally down. Socially, it just isn’t the same.

In fact, gaming is one of the last places men can congregate together in at least somewhat private groups and break social norms, say offensive things, and not be scolded or censored for it.

While the dopamine induced from the flashing lights and compelling music that video games provide does explain part of video game addiction, I think the greater part here is actually the fact that many young men find real community and a real chance to be themselves and connect in a way that feels right from a masculine perspective. Again, something that is increasingly hard to find in the physical world.

Overall I still have a complicated relationship with gaming. I often wonder whether my life would feel more complete and satisfying if I were able to put the same energy into different pursuits. Many people I respect, like Simon Sarris, have claimed that once you find more meaningful activities to passionately engage with, gaming no longer attracts you.

Video games lost their appeal coinciding with starting to date my wife. I think I can credit desire with a major change in perspective. Realizing that I wanted more/other things. My (then) gf of course but a trajectory for life generally…

Having an opportunity to make a house and gardens made it very easy to give up something like video games. I used to make beautiful structures in minecraft, but its a bore compared to physicality. I feel like I am shaping my own little national park. For my family, for the town.

I’ve related more and less to the quote above at various times in my life. Unfortunately, whatever I tend to put my energy and effort in ends up disappointing somehow, or perhaps I simply lose my zeal for it.

Either way, for the moment at least, I’m happy to continue gaming. While it may not be ‘productive’ in a certain sense, I’m learning to strive and connect with others in a healthier way. Plus I’m just having fun.

I don’t know what God has in store for my life, but I do hope that even as I get older, I at least dust off my gaming PC or console or VR headset (or whatever people use to game in the future) once or twice every year or two.

Book Review: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients (and my own crackpot rant on the subject)

16 comments - 1426 thread views 1mo ago by TitaniumButterfly (text post) Edited 1mo ago

Book Review - The Enigma of Cranial Deformation

(Ref: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients on Amazon but if you're actually interested in the topic you should buy The Bioarchaeology of Artificial Cranial Modifications: New Approaches to Head Shaping and its Meanings in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Beyond instead. I warn you now that while the latter is several leagues better, it's also much narrower in scope, and neither is even remotely satisfying.)

Introduction

So here's what everyone seems to agree upon:

The elite castes of many ancient peoples used to employ bindings to shape the heads of their children, bonsai-kitten style, in a practice now known as Artificial Cranial Deformation (ACD). This might seem strange, but what's even stranger is that the practice is found in ostensibly-isolated peoples from all around the world without any apparent mechanism of transmission, going back around at least ten thousand years. Almost everywhere in fact; the only major areas without a history of it are Australia and South India, though it does seem to have been quite rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are even remains of Neanderthals which appear to have been subjected to ACD!

This would seem to raise several questions, including:

How might the practice have spread around the world in an era without communication networks?
Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups?
Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere?
Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage?
Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it?
Neanderthals did it? Really?

Hopefully we can all agree that it's an interesting topic. I'm generally fascinated by the interplay of skull magnitude and brain development and its implications for cognition. We know that cranial capacity varies among human populations in a way that seems to scale linearly with intelligence. I can't tell you how titillated I was to discover that Oprah apparently has a head so massive that when she needed a wig for a movie role, the producers had to stitch two normal ones together which sheds some light on her success. This is just one example of the kind of wild stuff one encounters when looking into brain/cranial/cognitive matters.

There are many reasons to think that cranial shape may also play a role in differential cognition among populations, but this avenue of inquiry has been verboten in the academy for at least decades, and Django Unchained somehow seems to have driven the final nail in re: popular consciousness, so very little is actually known.

Things get even more intriguing when we start to delve into historical head binding/ACD. Not only was it universally reserved for the elites, and forbidden to the lower classes, but cross-culturally there seems to have been near-unanimous sentiment that the procedure made for children who were more intelligent, wiser, and more spiritual; 'closer to the gods'. Supposing all these cultures did invent the practice independently, which is already kind of a hard swallow, what are the odds that they'd all independently, and erroneously, ascribe such significance?

The mental image of elite ancient humans around the world having discovered a forbidden process by which they could not only uncounterfeitably mark their children as socially superior but also actually increase their brain size and thereby intelligence (and, if you will, their access to the spirit world) is just too good to pass up. Not only would it make for an amazing story, and represent an under-appreciated aspect of human development, but it also tantalizes; suggesting that maybe, just maybe, there's a key to massively increasing human intelligence today, for our own children, and it's been right in front of our noses this whole time, inconceivably overlooked by our intellectual classes; a lost secret waiting to be rediscovered. [Point of order: I solemnly swear that I have no intention of trying this on my own or anyone else's children.]

Also, I know this sounds crazy (and that I've already got two strikes against me for looking into officially-designated bunk in the first place) but I have a sort of personal interest in the matter. For you see, my own birth was unusually traumatic and in the process I experienced extreme levels of cranial deformation. I've seen the pictures and they're... unforgettable. My dad told me that it wasn't until several minutes after I was born that anyone in the room was even convinced I had a face. After some time my skull ended up shaped close enough to normal that it's not noticeably aberrant except that it's very large; like Oprah, procuring suitable headgear can be a problem for me. Thankfully I also have a very large chest and shoulders so it doesn't for the most part stand out, but the point is that, while both of my parents are of above-average intelligence, I'm easily a couple standard deviations above either of them and have always sort of wondered why. Can you blame me for looking to cranial deformation as a possible insight?

Regrettably, after reading The Enigma of Cranial Deformation, doing a bunch of fact-checking, and compulsively looking into other sources, I still don't have any solid answers (except to the Neanderthal question which is that, no, they probably didn't actually practice it). The reason I don't have answers is because this is a preposterous book stuffed to the gills with random nonsense. Yet I can't shake the impression that its main point, which is that something weird is going on here and mainstream scholarship doesn't seem to take it seriously enough, does turn out to be more or less valid.

What bums me out about this state of affairs is that it's pretty much what I expected going in, and I'm disappointed to have my priors confirmed. Much time and effort was spent and almost nothing of value was gained.

But I did read it, and took notes, and I'm trying this thing where I reward myself for reading books and writing reviews. So, in case anyone anyone else cares, here you go.

(If you'd like to know where I am at on all the questions enumerated above, I do come back to that toward the end.)

But Why Read This Book?

Look, for all that The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients takes itself very seriously, it is clearly not a serious academic work and that's not hard to tell from the cover. Or the publisher. Or by flipping it open to almost any random passage and reading a few words. In fact, let me just...

While it is easy to see them [the Olmecs] as Proto-Mayans and Citizens of Olman (however large that country may have been), we should also consider them as the fantastic Proto-Mesoamericans they may have been: psychedelic aliens who used lasers to cut colossal basalt heads; Atlantean refugees who made a last stand in Tabasco; or Shang Chinese mercenaries taken from East Africa or Melanesia and specially trained to administer the Pacific (and later Atlantic) ports of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; or perhaps a people originally from the Atlantic side all along, having come from Africa, possibly as a military force from Egypt or West Africa circa 1500 BC. There are many possibilities. (pp. 57-58)

Golly that was a good one and I expect it will save me a lot of time in trying to describe the experience of reading this book. So, again, why did I do it in the first place?

Well, 'fun' isn't the right word, but it's not a bad start. These books aren't entertainment for me, exactly. Actually, this one is fairly typical in that it's poorly-written and worsely-edited; leans heavily upon long, dry passages ripped from e.g. wikipedia; often goes on interminable, barely-relevant tangents; repeats itself regularly at length and in more or less the exact same language; and despite constantly slinging mud at mainstream scholars rarely if ever does it raise coherent objections to their conclusions. It's tedious to read, is what I'm saying, and it would be fair to ask why any non-schizophrenic would bother. (Unless...?)

And yet I do love the genre. I have ever since wandering into a new age coffee shop at 14 years old and losing the day to their little library which treated such topics as the dinosaur-infested hollow earth, breakaway Atlantean nazi moon bases, and the scandalous tantric sexual customs formerly practiced on the sunken continent of Lemuria. The authors often put enormous amounts of work into these books. If there's a real-life connection to be made between their crazy theories and actual scholarship you can bet they'll find it. It's fascinating to see their minds at work and, at their best, with just a bit of effort, it's possible to suspend one's own disbelief for a little while; long enough to get a glimpse of alternate histories and realities of such scope, complexity, and grandiosity to put even the greatest sci-fi to shame.

Like A Princess of Mars, part of the joy is the conceit that it's all real; that the little red dot one sees wandering across the night sky really is an exotic alien world called by its inhabitants Barsoom, and that if you manage to fall down the right hole in the middle of nowhere you might go there too. Unlike Burroughs, though, these authors seem to be entirely earnest. And that adds just a little something extra which, for me at least, takes it over the top. A sci-fi author understands the reader's suspension of disbelief to be implicitly granted; the author of HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy knows that he must always be at pains to help the reader justify its continued extension.

Still, reading actual sci-fi would be a lot less work. But actual sci-fi wouldn't have the added perk of legitimately substantially increasing one's real-life knowledge of history, geography, archaeology, and so on, in an academic capacity. The vast majority of the content in this book is solid, believe it or not, and the bibliography is thorough. Almost all the really crazy stuff is phrased in terms of questions or what-ifs, as in the passage quoted above. And this means that, as one reads more and more such books, repeatedly returning to the same hobbyhorse contentions of the genre, focusing as they do on perceived gaps and deficiencies in mainstream scholarship, one inevitably begins to make one's own novel connections. And one will inevitably learn a whole lot of truths that mainstream sources would never touch upon for fear of looking disreputable. Like about cranial capacity, and Oprah.

So this is what I was truly doing reading this book. There was a topic -- ACD -- that I wanted to know more about, and I knew that if there were some really cool but potentially-inflammatory things to know about it, a book like this would be the only place to find them. The authors do actually put a fair amount of effort into footnotes and the bibliography, and when in doubt it usually isn't hard to jot down an astonishing claim and verify it elsewhere.

As I mentioned earlier, the book was a bit of a letdown in that respect. Turns out there's just not actually much to be said on the subject, other than totally-correctly calling attention to how neglected the topic, and its possible implications, tend to be in mainstream scholarship. But even more than usual for such a book, The Enigma of Cranial Deformation introduced me to a bunch of (real) new concepts, in this case mainly related to Central and South American prehistory, and above all reignited the flame of my wonder for the ancient world and what may indeed, plausibly, have been.

Plus it was actually pretty fun after all. So in that spirit I'm still calling it a win.

The Book Itself

Chapter 1, Mysterious Elongated Skulls of the Ancients, bemuses the reader at the door by opening with a reference to the SNL routine/1993 feature film Coneheads. I can only imagine that this was intended to set people at ease by relating to something familiar, but it's wildly inappropriate for a book which otherwise insists upon itself as being of supreme credibility. And then, just to reinforce the point (no pun intended), it devotes most of the next page to a large print of the Coneheads movie poster, neatly labeled as such in case anyone weren't certain.

After that it spends a few pages on a fairly tight overview of ACD, though borrowing heavily from wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It helpfully distinguishes between dolichocephaloids, that is elongated skulls, and brachycephaloids, which is rounded skulls. Evidently the former sort of ACD is typical of Caucasian skeletons and the latter of Asiatic skeletons, but both types are found in all sorts of places, including Mesoamerica.

We're treated to a range of possible explanations including,

These people were a whole distinct branch of genus Homo and their heads were naturally that way genetically. This is based mainly upon a single reference from an 1851 work describing a mummified fetus whose head allegedly grew that way on its own, now lost to science;
The 'Atlantis Theory', basically that a race of head-binding supermen spanned the globe in prehistory, enlightening natives everywhere, who then copied the practice in a sort of cargo-cultism;
The 'Nephilim-Watchers Theory', tied to the Hindu Ramayana, which indicates that demi-angelic human hybrids operated essentially as described in the Atlantis theory above, sans Atlantis;
The 'Nephilim-Extraterrestrial Theory', which is the same as the previous one but aliens instead of angels; and
The Mainstream Theory, which isn't actually a theory at all so much as a very brief recap of the established facts with which I opened this book review.

These theories are mainly just mentioned for now rather than being fleshed out, and (other than the mainstream) will be regularly called back to throughout the rest of the book.

Then we get nine pages, which is about half the entire chapter, on the tangentially-related subject of trepanning. One gets the impression that the authors just wanted to talk about trepanning more than that they actually thought its inclusion was justified in terms of bolstering their theses, which are themselves also left to the reader's imagination.

One minor note here: The authors claim that ACD is unknown in Oceania, but later blow this absolutely conclusively out of the water in chapter 6. As I said, the editing is abysmal.

Chapter 2, Evolution, Ancient Man, and the Cranium is a brief recap of the history of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as an overview of the then-current 'Out of Africa' model of human expansion, buttressed by some alternative scenarios involving sunken continents. It was around this point that I started to wonder how much of what I was reading was vital context for some impending brilliant hypothesis, and how much was just filler. (In retrospect, it was definitely mainly the latter.)

Chapter 3, Cranial Deformation and the Olmecs is a longer chapter which has a lot to do with the history of archaeology in Mesoamerica, and the Olmecs in particular, but relatively little time spent on ACD. One interesting point is that Olmec art was replete with images of human beings who, at a glance, look decidedly Chinese or Egyptian based on style of dress, and facial features including beards. A couple fairly convincing examples are included. The chapter ends with a whole bunch of super cool photographs of Olmec figurines, directly related to head binding, but with almost zero explanation or additional information.

(Here, at roughly its mid-point, the book takes a break for a pretty good color photo section which reproduces many of the black and white photos spread throughout.)

Chapter 4, Cranial Deformation in South America is much more consistent in relating its content to the subject of head-binding but still rambles quite a bit about ancillary topics and mainly seems interested in grousing about how many ACD-related artifacts are in storage in obscure museums instead of displayed to the public or available to amateur researchers. Coincidence? Not if you ask the authors, though they don't ever quite seem to get around to offering suggestions as to who's hiding the truth or why. But I should mention that this section did have a lot of really cool, if ultimately irrelevant, information about the prehistory of Peru etc.

Chapter 5, Egyptian, African and European Cranial Deformation initially frustrated me by lumping all these areas together when I'd have been much happier with a full chapter on each. And, upon reading it, there is very little information about any of the above. This is where I started questioning the authors' mental stability, as they seem to have a hard time staying on topic or even conceiving of what a thorough survey would look like. Instead we're treated to a lot of borrowed passages about certain specific topics, including multiple pages on the possible racial background of Nefertiti specifically, the so-called 'Serpent-Priests' of Malta, and the general nature of Huns. This entire chapter is like eighteen pages and took me about ten minutes to read. My disappointment was great, since this is the chapter to which I had most been looking forward.

However it did have a whole lot of very cool, if extremely random, tidbits gleaned from across vast swathes of history. The stuff about Nefertiti and the Mitanni was mainly a wash, but if half of what they say about ancient Malta is true I want to find a book just about that, and apparently there was a brief resurgence in the popularity of headbinding in 19th-century France in response to the widespread phrenology craze current at the time. Also some pretty good photos including some of real-life ACD-recipients from 1930s Central Africa.

(This is as good a place as any to mention that while this book fails entirely at its main purpose and is generally an embarrassment to even be caught with, it is very easy reading and entirely suitable as a casual curiosity when one is taken by the right mood.)

Chapter 6: Cranial Deformation In Asia and Pacific Islands is an extremely cursory survey of some ancient ACD-related folklore including about the Taoist Immortals, who are often portrayed with elongated heads. In this chapter I also discovered that in some parts of ancient proto-Korea possibly most of the population practiced forehead-flattening, based on skeletal evidence and surviving contemporary accounts. One cool aside is that head-binding and elongation is still practiced to this day in Vanuatu, contradicting the author's own initial assertion that Oceania is one of the only places with no tradition of the practice(?). But the upshot here is that as a result there is actual video of headbinding in action! Though the book does not suggest where it may be found.

Then we jump, for some reason, to the Pacific Northwest, where it turns out that the 'Flathead Indians'... were that.

Chapter 7: The Nefilim, the Watchers, and Elongated Heads is awesome. There's not much new information about ACD, but here the authors finally take off the kid gloves and go whole-hog on outrageously fantastical propositions regarding what may explain the phenomenon of ACD. Mainly these track the theories initially established in Chapter 1, but with all kinds of additional colorful details.

The main gist seems to be that there was some kind of race of human, angel/ET, or hybrid of all of the above that looked more or less like we do except taller and with elongated skulls. These creatures map to the biblical Nephilim, 'giants'; beings of great strength and wisdom and beauty and prowess; heroes of old; who established kingdoms everywhere, uplifted the local human strains to something like modern levels of intelligence, and then vanished for unknown reasons though not without some interbreeding. We also get Atlantis, the lost planet of Nibiru, and the Anunnaki thrown in, plus a lot more vague implications that the truth is being hidden by all archaeological institutions everywhere for unspecified purposes.

This chapter has to be read to be appreciated, but it was extremely up my alley and very much worth the price of admission to the book, even if I could very easily have started with it and skipped the enormous amount of ultimately irrelevant information that constitutes the majority of the preceding chapters.

Unfortunately, having finished, I've found none of the sort of alt-science that I was looking for and am only closer to answering my initial questions by dint of having had a while to think them over while wading through whatever this was.

Verdict: buy it if it sounds like your cup of tea and don't bother reading straight through; it should make for a lovely diversion on some rainy day when the power has gone out. At least you know what you're signing up for.

Where I'm Left Re: Artificial Cranial Deformation

Here we dismiss The Enigma of Cranial Deformation entirely because as should be clear by now it doesn't have any place in adult conversation.

(It's late and I'm tired so allow me to ramble out my current understanding if you will.)

I have, of course, read a whole lot of other material on this subject, including a bunch of mainstream academic work and some pop-level synopses on various websites and so on. The mainstream consensus, as I understand it, is as follows (my portrayal, not an actual quote):

ACD became popular all over the place for the simple reason that it allowed upper classes to distinguish themselves from lower classes and had the advantage of requiring only some sticks and twine to accomplish, thus making it available pretty much everywhere.

Contrary to what the layman would expect, ACD cannot possibly confer any cognitive advantage because it does not actually increase cranial capacity -- it just looks like it would -- and even if it did we have no reason to believe that bigger cranial capacity would result in bigger brains.

Skull shape per se also has zero effect on cognitive development or patterns, which we know because different people groups have different skull structures and WE CAN SURELY ALL AGREE that this has not resulted in any innate cognitive differences among groups.

Furthermore, it is only natural that societal elites the world over, having reserved the practice for their own children, and having already justified their class status by supposing themselves intellectually/spiritually superior to their subject populations, would conflate the two, thus tying a neat little bow on the question of why they all thought the procedure made people smarter and more divine.

The matter is settled and anyone who shows too much interest in looking further into it should expect the same sort of treatment they'd receive if they started asking questions about other settled science, e.g. the nonexistent heredity of cognitive traits, or the equally-nonexistent innate psychological differences between men and women.

Yeah I'm editorializing heavily here but I'm also trying to wrap this up. So here are my thoughts.

A whole lot of materially-trivial body modification procedures, including piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and even circumcision (etc. etc.) would seem to be able to serve about as well for arbitrarily signifying membership in elite social castes. And to be sure, those and others have all been used that way in various times and places. But the valence of each of those other practices varied from culture to culture, and nothing else has anywhere near the same consistency of association with the socio-cognitive elite. It's not at all clear why ACD should be such a conspicuous exception.

It could be argued that one key advantage of ACD as an arbitrary status marker is that it can only be achieved in infancy. This prevents up-and-comers from weaseling their way into high status later in life. But there are other such procedures, and none has ever been nearly so popular across time and race. The neck-coilers of Myanmar, for example, or foot binding in China. Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no shortage of methods by which elite children can be uncounterfeitably marked as such. Simply ban the practice among the proles and execute the entire family of anyone caught in the process. Easy peasy. So again, why this one? Besides which, as far as I can tell, most cultures didn't bother in the first place because simply having the speech, mannerisms, and bearing of nobility was a good-enough shibboleth to satisfy the demand.

Whereas, if children's heads can be shaped to increase cranial capacity, and this does result in greater brain volume, the picture starts to make perfect sense.

Regarding the assertion that ACD does not actually increase cranial volume, but only appears to, I think I need to call BS.

As I understand the situation, it's true that ACD-processed skulls are not uniformly possessed of greater cranial capacity. The standard mainstream academic line is that while they might look bigger, this is because humans are bad at comparing the relative volumes of spheroids (very true) and in fact ACD doesn't have any significant impact on cranial capacity at all! (The stock ACD-scholar metaphor here is that you can take a ball of clay and elongate it by stretching but you still have the same amount of clay).

That sounds really good, but I have several problems with it.

For one, I have personally seen elongated skulls that were measured to have much greater cranial capacity than modern averages; sometimes as much as circa 50% more. (They're commonly encountered when tooling around certain museums in the Yucatán.) So I know for a fact that the procedure can substantially increase cranial capacity. When challenged, mainstream scholars will admit that, okay, yeah, that can happen, but the procedure as practiced in other specimens can actually reduce cranial volume, and in most surveys of ACD skeletons there really is almost no change to total cranial capacity compared to contemporary population averages (where available).

But to me this only suggests that some versions of the practice are more effective than others, which is so obvious that it bothers me to have to point it out. It also fits in well with cargo-culting and drift over time as the general impression of the practice is aped without preserving the vital finer points which (maybe) result in bigger craniums and (maybe) bigger brains.

More to the point, having dug as far into this question as is practical for someone who after all does have a job (and other hobbies at that), I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of ACD skeletons lie in storage without ever having been measured; let alone against 'contemporary population averages', which are usually not even available for comparison, and where they are at all the sample sizes are typically paltry and often not even clearly contemporary. Frankly, I think we just don't know. What I do know is that institutional bias in this field runs very strongly and all in one direction, and so I remain gleefully skeptical.

Besides which, all else being equal, I'd expect elites to have bigger skulls and brains for reasons of nutrition if not necessarily also sheer genetics. It would be pretty crazy if they didn't, yeah? So if elites have bigger skulls, and elites are also practicing ACD, how can it be the case that ACD isn't correlated with bigger skulls?

Now, when it comes to whether artificially goosing a baby's skull into larger cranial volume even results in larger adult brain volume, I have to admit that I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does either. Wish I had more to tell you, but I don't except that I don't buy the default denials of the 'experts' for more or less the same reasons as above.

As to whether cranial shape affects the cognitive tendencies of the brain which grew inside it, aka 'phrenology', it probably doesn't need to be said that anyone who knows anything is keeping their mouths shut tight about it and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Great work, Tarantino. =/

In Summary

I don't ultimately have any respectable grounds on which to argue that ACD worked, or works, or that it's worth attempting on some kind of trial basis just in case. Sure the possibility is tantalizing, and part of me hopes that somebody gives it a shot, but only in the morbid way that I also want to see a bunch of five year olds deposited on an island and left to develop in isolation (which is to say, I don't.)

But I do notice that the authors of books like The Enigma of Cranial Deformation actually have at least one leg to stand on when they rail against the close-mindedness and general ignorance of the authorities on the subject. Too much of this maps too well onto too many similar 'settled' controversies in the science of human cognition. I suppose I hardly need to belabor this point.

So here's my final tally:

How might ACD have spread around the world in an era without communication networks? - I still have no idea.
Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups? - That strikes me as absurdly implausible but I'm at a loss as to alternatives.
Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere? - Because it works, maybe, but I really don't know.
Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage? - I'd bet about ten thousand US dollars that it can, but not much more.
Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it? - Less than I'd like but where we do have that information it's extremely consistent.
Neanderthals did it? Really? - No. I didn't have time to get into this but the Neanderthal specimens almost certainly got their skulls warped in other ways, most likely after death. They are very old and things just shift around that way.

All in all, artificial cranial deformation is just an unbelievably fascinating subject that I expect to go to my grave still buzzing with curiosity about. Sadly, rather than any grand conspiracy, this is probably just because for purely historically-incidental reasons looking into the matter has become coded as low-status.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Contra The Usual Interpretation Of The Whispering Earring

44 comments - 1199 thread views 1mo ago by self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi (text post)

The usual reading of Scott's short story The Whispering Earring is easy to state and hard to resist. Here is a magical device that gives uncannily good advice, slowly takes over ever more of the user's cognition, leaves them outwardly prosperous and beloved, and eventually reveals a seemingly uncomfortable neuroanatomical price.

The moral seems obvious: do not hand your agency to a benevolent-seeming optimizer. Even if it makes you richer, happier, and more effective, it will hollow you out and leave behind a smiling puppet. Dentosal's recent post on LessWrong makes exactly this move, treating the earring as a parable about the temptation to outsource one's executive function to Claude or some future AI assistant. uugr's comment there emphasizes sharpens the standard horror: the earring may know what would make me happy, and may even optimize for it perfectly, but it is not me, its mind is shaped differently, and the more I rely on it the less room there is for whatever messy, friction-filled thing I used to call myself.

I do not wish to merely quibble around the edges. I intend to attack the hidden premise that makes the standard reading feel obvious. That premise is that if a process preserves your behavior, your memories-in-action, your goals, your relationships, your judgments about what makes your life go well, and even your higher-order endorsement of the person you have become, but does not preserve the original biological machinery in the original way, then it has still killed you in the sense that matters. What I'm basically saying is: hold on, why should I grant that? If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?

Simulation and emulation are not magic tricks. If you encode an abacus into a computer running on the Von-Neumann architecture, and it outputs exactly what the actual abacus would for the same input, for every possible input you care to try (or can try, if you formally verify the system), then I consider it insanity to claim that you haven't got a “real” abacus or that the process is merely “faking” the work. Similarly, if a superintelligent entity can reproduce my behaviors, memories, goals and values, then it must have a very high-fidelity model of me inside, somewhere. I think that such a high-fidelity model can, in the limit, pass as myself, and is me in most/all of the ways I care about.

That is already enough to destabilize the standard interpretation, because the text of the story is much friendlier to the earring than people often remember. The earring is not described as pursuing a foreign objective. On the contrary, the story goes out of its way to insist that it tells the wearer what would make the wearer happiest, and that it is "never wrong." It does not force everyone into some legible external success metric. If your true good on a given day is half-assing work and going home to lounge around, that is what it says. It learns your tastes at high resolution, down to the breakfast that will uniquely hit the spot before you know you want it. Across 274 recorded wearers, the story reports no cases of regret for following its advice, and no cases where disobedience was not later regretted. The resulting lives are "abnormally successful," but not in a sterile, flanderized or naive sense. They are usually rich, beloved, embedded in family and community. This is a strikingly strong dossier for a supposedly sinister artifact.

I am rather confident that this is a clear knock-down argument against true malice or naive maximization of “happiness” in the Unaligned Paperclip Maximization sense. The earring does not tell you to start injecting heroin (or whatever counterpart exists in the fictional universe), nor does it tell you to start a Cult of The Earring, which is the obvious course of action if it valued self-preservation as a terminal goal.

At this point the orthodox reader says: yes, yes, that is how the trap works. The earring flatters your values in order to supplant them. But notice how much this objection is doing by assertion. Where in the text is the evidence of value drift? Where are the formerly gentle people turned into monstrous maximizers, the poets turned into dentists, the mystics turned into hedge fund managers? The story gives us flourishing and brain atrophy, and invites us to infer that the latter discredits the former. But that inference is not forced. It is a metaphysical preference, maybe even an aesthetic preference, smuggled in under cover of common sense. My point is that if the black-box outputs continue to look like the same person, only more competent and less akratic, the burden of proof has shifted. The conservative cannot simply point to tissue loss and say "obviously death." He has to explain why biological implementation deserves moral privilege over functional continuity.

This becomes clearest at the point of brain atrophy. The story says that the wearers' neocortices have wasted away, while lower systems associated with reflexive action are hypertrophied. Most readers take this as the smoking gun. But I think I notice something embarrassing for that interpretation:

If the neocortex, the part we usually associate with memory, abstraction, language, deliberation, and personality, has become vestigial, and yet the person continues to live an outwardly coherent human life, where exactly is the relevant information and computation happening? There are only two options. Either the story is not trying very hard to be coherent, in which case the horror depends on handwaving physiology. Or the earring is in fact storing, predicting, and running the higher-order structure that used to be carried by the now-atrophied brain. In that case, the story has (perhaps accidentally) described something much closer to a mind-upload or hybrid cognitive prosthesis than to a possession narrative.

And if it is a hybrid cognitive prosthesis, the emotional valence changes radically. Imagine a device that, over time, learns you so well that it can offload more and more executive function, then more and more fine-grained motor planning, then eventually enough of your cognition that the old tissue is scarcely needed. If what remains is not an alien tyrant wearing your face, but a system that preserves your memories, projects your values, answers to your name, loves your family, likes your breakfast, and would pass every interpersonal Turing test imposed by people who knew you best, then many transhumanists would call this a successful migration, not a murder. The "horror" comes from insisting beforehand that destructive or replacement-style continuation cannot count as continuity. But that is precisely the contested premise.

Greg Egan spent much of his career exploring exactly this scenario, most famously in "Learning to Be Me," where humans carry jewels that gradually learn to mirror every neural state, until the original brain is discarded and the jewel continues, successfully, in most cases. The horror in Egan's story is a particular failure mode, not the general outcome. The question of whether the migration preserves identity is non-trivial, and Egan's treatment is more careful than most philosophy of personal identity, but the default response from most readers, that it is obviously not preservation, reflects an assumption rather than a conclusion. If you believe that identity is constituted by functional continuity rather than substrate, the jewel and the earring are not killing their hosts. They are running them on better hardware.

There is a second hidden assumption in the standard reading, namely that agency is intrinsically sacred in a way outcome-satisfaction is not. Niderion-nomai’s final commentary says that "what little freedom we have" would be wasted on us, and that one must never take the shortest path between two points.

I'm going to raise an eyebrow here: this sounds profound, and maybe is, but it is also suspiciously close to a moralization of friction. The anti-earring position often treats effort, uncertainty, and self-direction as terminal goods, rather than as messy instruments we evolved because we lacked access to perfect advice. Yet in ordinary life we routinely celebrate technologies that remove forms of “agency” we did not actually treasure. The person with ADHD who takes stimulants is not usually described as having betrayed his authentic self by outsourcing task initiation to chemistry. He is more often described as becoming able to do what he already reflectively wanted to do. The person freed from locked-in syndrome is not criticized because their old pattern of helpless immobility better expressed their revealed preferences. As someone who does actually use stimulants for his ADHD, the analogy works because it isolates the key issue. The drugs make me into a version of myself that I fully identify with, and endorse on reflection even when off them. There is a difference between changing your goals and reducing the friction that keeps you from reaching them. The story's own description strongly suggests the earring belongs to the second category.

(And the earring itself does not minimize all friction for itself. How inconvenient. As I've noted before, it could lie or deceive and get away with it with ease.)

Of course the orthodox reader can reply that the earring goes far beyond stimulant-level support. It graduates from life advice to high-bandwidth motor control. Surely that crosses the line. But why, exactly? Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done. The earring may be unsettling because it replaces one set of subsystems with another, but "replaces local implementation with better local implementation" is not, by itself, a moral catastrophe. If the replacement is transparent to your values and preserves the structure you care about, then the complaint becomes more like substrate chauvinism than a substantive account of harm.

What, then, do we do with the eeriest detail of all, namely that the earring's first advice is always to take it off? On the standard reading this is confession. Even the demon knows it is a demon. I wish to offer another coherent explanation, which I consider a much better interpretation of the facts established in-universe:

Suppose the earring is actually well aligned to the user's considered interests, but also aware that many users endorse a non-functionalist theory of identity. In that case, the first suggestion is not "I am evil," but "on your present values, you may regard what follows as metaphysically disqualifying, so remove me unless you have positively signed up for that trade." Or perhaps the earring itself is morally uncertain, and so warns users before beginning a process that some would count as death and others as transformation. Either way, the warning is evidence against ordinary malice. A truly manipulative artifact, especially one smart enough to run your life flawlessly, could simply lie. Instead it discloses the danger immediately, then thereafter serves the user faithfully. That is much more like informed consent than predation.

Is it perfectly informed consent? Hell no. At least not by 21st century medical standards. However, I see little reason to believe that the story is set in a culture with 21st century standards imported as-is from reality. As the ending of the story demonstrates, the earring is willing to talk, and appears to do so honestly (leaning on my intuition that if a genuinely superhuman intelligence wanted to deceive you, it would probably succeed). The earring, as a consequence of its probity, ends up at the bottom of the world's most expensive trash heap. Hardly very agentic, is that? The warning could reflect not "I respect your autonomy" but "I've discharged my minimum obligation and now we proceed." That's a narrower kind of integrity. Though I note this reading still doesn't support the predation interpretation.

This matters because the agency-is-sacred reading depends heavily on the earring being deceptive or coercive. Remove that, and what you have is a device that says, or at least could say on first contact: "here is the price, here is what I do, you may leave now." Every subsequent wearer who keeps it on has, in some meaningful sense, consented. The fact that their consent might be ill-informed regarding their metaphysical commitments is the earring's problem to the extent it could explain more clearly, but the text suggests it cannot explain more clearly, because the metaphysical question is genuinely contested and the earring knows this. It hedges by warning, rather than deceiving by flattering. Once again, for emphasis: this is the behavior of an entity with something like integrity, not something like predation.

Derek Parfit spent much of Reasons and Persons arguing that our intuitions about personal identity are not only contingent but incoherent, and that the important question is not "did I survive?" but "is there psychological continuity?" If Parfit is even approximately right, the neocortex atrophy is medically remarkable but not metaphysically fatal. The story encodes a culturally specific theory of personal identity and presents it as a universal horror. The theory is roughly: you are your neocortex, deliberate cognition is where "you" live, and anything that circumvents or supplants that process is not helping you, it is eliminating you and leaving a functional copy. This is a common view. Plenty of philosophers hold it. But plenty of others hold that what matters for personal identity is psychological continuity regardless of physical instantiation, and on those views the earring is not a murderer. It is a very good prosthesis that the user's culture never quite learned to appreciate.

I suspect (but cannot prove, since this is a work of fiction) that a person like me could put on the earring and not even receive the standard warning. I would be fine with my cognition being offloaded, even if I would prefer (all else being equal), that the process was not destructive.

None of this proves the earring is safe. I am being careful, and thus will not claim certainty here, and the text does leave genuine ambiguities. Maybe the earring really is an alien optimizer that wears your values as a glove until the moment they become inconvenient. Maybe "no recorded regret" just means the subjects were behaviorally prevented from expressing regret. Maybe the rich beloved patriarch at the end of the road is a perfect counterfeit, and the original person is as gone as if eaten by nanites. But this is exactly the point. The story does not establish the unpalatable conclusion nearly as firmly as most readers think. It relies on our prior intuition that real personhood resides in unaided biological struggle, that using the shortest path is somehow cheating, and that becoming more effective at being yourself is suspiciously close to becoming someone else.

The practical moral for 2026 is therefore narrower than the usual "never outsource agency" slogan. Dentosal may still be right about Claude in practice, because current LLMs are obviously not the Whispering Earring. They are not perfectly aligned, not maximally competent, not guaranteed honest, not known to preserve user values under deep delegation. The analogy may still warn us against lazy dependence on systems that simulate understanding better than they instantiate loyalty. But that is a contingent warning about present tools, not a general theorem that cognitive outsourcing is self-annihilation. If a real earring existed with the story's properties, a certain kind of person, especially a person friendly to upload-style continuity and unimpressed by romantic sermons about struggle, might rationally decide that putting it on was not surrender but self-improvement with very little sacrifice involved. I would be rather tempted.

The best anti-orthodox reading of The Whispering Earring is not that the sage was stupid, nor that Scott accidentally wrote propaganda for brain-computer interfaces. It is that the story is a parable whose moral depends on assumptions stronger than the plot can justify. Read Doylistically, it says: beware any shortcut that promises your values at the cost of your agency. Read Watsonianly, it may instead say: here exists a device that understands you better than you understand yourself, helps you become the person you already wanted to be, never optimizes a foreign goal, warns you up front about the metaphysical price, and then slowly ports your mind onto a better substrate. Whether that is damnation or salvation turns out to depend less on the artifact than on your prior theory of personal identity. And explicitly pointing this out, I think, is the purpose of my essay. I do not seek to merely defend the earring out of contrarian impulse. I want to force you to admit what, exactly, you think is being lost.

Miscellaneous notes:

The kind of atrophy described in the story does not happen. Not naturally, not even if someone is knocked unconscious and does not use their brain in any intentional sense for decades. The brain does cut-corners if neuronal pathways are left under-used, and will selectively strengthen the circuitry that does get regular exercise. But not anywhere near the degree the story depicts. You can keep someone in an induced coma for decades and you won't see the entire neocortex wasted away to vestigiality.

Is this bad neuroscience? Eh, I'd say that's a possibility, but given that I've stuck to a Watsonian interpretation so far (and have a genuinely high regard for Scott's writing and philosophizing), it might well just be the way the earring functions best without being evidence of malice. We are, after all, talking about an artifact that is close to magical, or is, at the very least, a form of technology advanced enough to be very hard to distinguish from magic. It is, however, less magical than it was at the time of writing. If you don't believe me, fire up your LLM of choice and ask it for advice.

If it so pleases you, you may follow this link to the Substack version of this post. A like and a subscribe would bring me succor in my old age, or at least give me a mild dopamine boost.

Summary of Conned Again, Watson

5 comments - 762 thread views 22d ago by ToaKraka Dislikes you (text post)

(Note: This post was originally written many years ago (1 2 3). As this is largely a lazy copy-and-paste karma farm, I have not checked all the links to see whether they still work.)

The book Conned Again, Watson consists of twelve short stories of “rationalist” Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, published for profit with the blessing of the copyright holder (since, at the time of publication, the franchise still was far from entering the public domain). Each story is accompanied by a paragraph or three of explanation (sometimes including book recommendations) in the book's afterword.

The URL given for the author's site in the book's afterword has been dead for quite a few years, but the Internet Archive has a copy saved.

The Case of the Unfortunate Businessman (Chapter 1)

Framing Story

After inheriting a cab business, Watson's cousin James attempted to emulate “how the Americans have reduced company management to a science”. However, James botched it so badly that his company was nearing bankruptcy. He then was taken in by a con man. Watson encourages him to go to Holmes regarding the con, and Holmes informs James that he was such a perfect mark that the con man probably will approach him again, at which point Holmes will aid in the criminal's capture. Holmes then inquires as to how James actually implemented the “modern American management methods”.

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

[Sherlock:] “I really must congratulate you, Watson. In the course of one morning's ordinary domestic decisions, you have managed to replicate on a small scale every one of the errors that brought your cousin's business to its knees!”

The Case of the Gambling Nobleman (Chapter 2)

Framing Story

A woman affianced to a nobleman seeks Holmes's help. Her husband-to-be is low on cash, but has thought of a “foolproof” system to get a new fortune at the roulette table.

Topics

Regression toward the mean vs. the gambler's fallacy

Author's Book Recommendations

Taking Chances

Quotes

[Sherlock:] “Perhaps people unconsciously assume that Fortune has a finite number of outcomes in the sack of black and white pebbles she carries. Then the more black pebbles you are dealt, the higher the proportion of white remain in her sack, and the more likely you are to get white. But in truth her supply is infinite, and she can always continue to give black or white at perfect whim. Failure to understand that is the first great human fallacy in misunderstanding the Laws of Chance.…

“The second great fallacy is to think that you can ignore a very tiny chance of a very large loss or gain. A mathematician would warn you of the meaninglessness of multiplying zero by infinity, but we did not have to venture into such abstractions to see that the Marquis's second system would have come to grief eventually.”

The Case of the Surprise Heir (Chapter 3)

Framing Story

The ageing (and seemingly-benign) leader of a small cult seeks Holmes's help. According to her faith, she must bequeath her “church” to a descendant of her great-grandfather (the cult's founder). The leader must choose which candidate is the best, based on which of them was born on a particular mystically-significant date, which is known only to her. She knows of 61 candidates, 60 in Britain and one in Canada. However, the one in Canada is an infidel who mocks the cult. In response to the leader's inquiries, the Canadian has written back to say that there are 59 more candidates, “living in various parts of the Americas”, of whose identities the leader is ignorant.

The Canadian sends over a list of birthdays, but refuses to give the corresponding names and addresses. Instead, the Canadian insists that the cult leader must tell the mystically-significant date to the Canadian, after which the Canadian will contact whichever candidate matches it. However, it is the cult leader's suspicion that there are no other American relatives, and the Canadian is plotting to take over the church (using a non-relative accomplice with a fake birthday), squander its assets (“large houses in London and New York, and also a fund of several thousand pounds”), and milk its members. The cult leader wants to know whether the Canadian's list of birthdays looks fake. She gives to Holmes two lists of birthdays—one for the 60 British candidates, and one for the 60 alleged American candidates. She has not labeled the two lists, as she expects Holmes to tell her which one “looks suspicious in its very nature”.

Topics

Quotes

[Sherlock:] “Not a bad simile, Watson: real randomness is a sharp and spiky place, which will cut the unwary as surely as sharp rocks rip apart the boots and hands of the ill-equipped cave explorer. We are unaccustomed to such roughness because processes human and artificial so often give nonrandom pattern to the world we encounter, and uniformity is a simple pattern to generate, and therefore commonplace.…”

Holmes raised a long finger. “Never mistake uniformity for the product of randomness. But you are not alone in your error: mistaking a uniform distribution for a random one is a common blunder. Indeed, it is worthy of being tagged as the third great human fallacy in misunderstanding the Laws of Chance! You had better start making a list. It is as ever most instructive to talk to you, Watson.”

Compare the following sentence, which wouldn't look out of place in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

Harry's brain complained that it never would have encountered a random distribution in the ancestral environment.

The Case of the Ancient Mariner (Chapter 4)

Framing Story

A drunken sailor whom Holmes and Watson saw “walking a perfect mathematical Drunkard's Walk” in chapter 2 apparently fell off a pier and drowned shortly after they observed his stumbling. However, he had recently taken out a large life insurance policy, with his sister as the sole beneficiary. The insurance company suspects fraud, and refuses to pay out. Inspector Lestrade is sympathetic toward the sister, and has asked Holmes to investigate.

Topics

Quotes

“Why, confound it, Holmes, I have once again drawn Napoleon's hat!”

“Quite so, Watson. You have indeed chosen a fitting name for the Normal Distribution. Just as Napoleon sought to conquer all the populations he encountered, so the ‘Napoleon's hat’ curve tends to dominate all random populations encountered in nature. But remember this: Napoleon ultimately failed in his quest—he never ruled all of Europe, despite his ambition. And, similarly, not every imaginable population conforms to the normal distribution, although student mathematicians sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that all must.”

The Case of the Unmarked Graves (Chapter 5)

Framing Story

Watson goes to visit an old college friend who wants to undertake some excavations in order to uncover possible Arthurian artifacts. (The friend, named Prendergast, thinks that he may be a descendant of King Arthur Pendragon.) However, the friend's father (whose line has held the title of “Mage” since before the Norman Conquest) has forbidden any excavation unless Prendergast can prove that the chance of turning up something important is better than one in two. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) also has been invited.

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

The Mage looked at [Dodgson] scornfully. “One-half to two-thirds,” he said savagely. “That seems to be your theme song, Reverend.”

The Case of the Martian Invasion (Chapter 6)

Framing Story

After seeing a horrific face on the surface of the Moon, hearing about crop circles in nearby fields, and finding the message “ARES COMES” in the Bible, an aspiring engineer thinks that a Martian invasion is imminent.

Topics

Compound probability
Dependency of events
Redundancy in engineering

Quotes

[Holmes] ticked off points on his fingers. “First, you showed us how the human eye and brain can detect pattern where there is none. It is understandable design by evolution, for it is better to be frightened by ten shadows than to overlook one actual tiger, but it often trips us up in modern life.

“Second, there is the fallacy of retrodiction—conducting a blanket search of a great number of possibilities, and claiming subsequently how unlikely it is to get just that message in just that position. It is more often done by numerology: measure every possible dimension of the Great Pyramid, say, in every system of units known to you, and then try dozens of possible numerical combinations of the results to see whether any of the numbers that emerge seem significant, such as being a famous year in the Christian calendar. But your Bible messages have that beat all hollow.”

Three Cases of Unfair Preferment (Chapter 7)

Framing Story

First, Watson reads about a parlor game in which three people must pretend to be historical figures (e. g., Newton, Caesar, and Socrates) and argue over which of the three should be thrown out of a sinking hot-air balloon. Second, Lestrade calls Holmes out to investigate the murder of a philanthropist, in which three attractive young women whom he was considering for a scholarship are suspects. Third, the woman from chapter 2 writes to ask for advice, as her husband-to-be, while having vowed to stay away from casinoes forever, has fallen in with a peculiar gentleman's club that supposedly deals solely in games of skill.

Topics

Quotes

I shook my head. “Really, this seems like black magic, Holmes.”

“Not so, Watson. But it does go against a false intuition that Nature has hard-wired firmly into our brains: the fallacy of judgement, that people or objects can always be ranked in order of value, from best to worse, in a sort of beauty contest. Let us be thankful that it is not true.”

The Execution of Andrews (Chapter 8)

Framing Story

The lone survivor of a ten-thousand-man army killed by ambush in the backwoods of British Burma is being slaughtered by the newspapers just as badly as his comrades were by the Burmese, and is expected to be convicted of desertion and hanged.

Topics

Bayes's theorem, with helpful visualizations that continue to be presented in later chapters

Author's Book Recommendations

Bayesian Decision Problems and Markov Chains

Quotes

“Bayes's theorem sets out formally the criteria for calculating probability ratios such as those we have been encountering today.”

“I will be sure to credit him if I write up today's events. If you show me it, perhaps I should reproduce his formula to illustrate the point.”

Holmes turned the book toward me to reveal, I must say, a rather intimidating piece of algebra.

“I would not advise it, Watson. I have heard it said that every equation appearing in a popular book halves its sales: your fear of algebra is not unique. I confidently predict that if this formula appears in all its glory, your sales will be decimated—and in the modern sense of the word! No, you should confine yourself to illustration by example. Those window-frame-shaped diagrams I have been drawing for you summarize Bayes's approach exactly.”

Three Cases of Relative Honor (Chapter 9)

Framing Story

First, Mycroft calls in Holmes to investigate a diplomatically-sensitive burglary at the French Embassy, in which two suspects have been caught but refuse to talk. Second, an officer about to be court-martialed for indirectly causing the deaths of the men under his command asks Holmes whether he made the correct decision under the circumstances in which he found himself. Third, Holmes contemplates the similarity of the officer's situation to Holmes's own decision in The Final Problem—of whether, in attempting to flee to the continent, he should have gone directly to Dover or left the train at Canterbury after he learned that Moriarty was chasing him in a special train.

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

I blinked at the complex array of figures.

[Sherlock:] “Henderson wants to choose a column that maximizes his chance of survival. But the Mauras will pick the row that minimizes it. Hence arises the concept of the minimax, beloved of game theorists. We must look for the column in which the lowest value is as high as possible.”

“Well, it does not matter now, Holmes. As it turned out, you went to Canterbury, and survived; Moriarty is dead, and can never tell us on what basis he chose Dover. All else is moot.”

Holmes looked at me without seeming to see me, his gaze focused somewhere beyond infinity. “Is it, Watson? Do you remember [from The Einstein Paradox, this book's physics-focused prequel] the many-worlds view of reality, endorsed by Challenger and many other clever physicists, that arises out of quantum theory?…

“In that case, the original Sherlock Holmes who tossed a coin on the way to Canterbury gave rise to a huge (but not infinite) number of subsequent versions. Call that number a zillion if all had survived. If I had rolled a die as I should have done, a third of a zillion would be alive now. As it is, there are only a quarter of a zillion. One-twelfth of those other versions of myself were killed by my stupidity.”

I gazed into the fireplace for some time, musing like Holmes on philosophical realities almost impossible to grasp.

The Case of the Poor Observer (Chapter 10) and The Case of the Perfect Accountant (Chapter 11)

The afterword advises that these chapters “should be taken together”.

Framing Story

A businessman (the son of a person who died in The Einstein Paradox) comes to Holmes for advice on how he should manage his business.

Topics

Misleading observations and statistics
Benford's law

Author's Book Recommendations

How to Lie with Statistics

Quotes

From the afterword:

[These chapters] deal with the same problem: How do you construct an accurate picture of the world, given that your subjective impressions may be misleading, and second-hand reports deliberately selective?

Three Cases of Good Intentions (Chapter 12)

Framing Story

First, someone is poisoning people accused of criminal deeds with butterscotch sweets, in a procedure that looks something like Russian roulette. Second, Watson has discovered that nightshade extract seems to be an effective treatment for Baird's disease—but it seems to help only half of the patients to whom he prescribes it. Third, Reverend Dodgson (fron chapter 5) has devised a way to extend “I cut, you choose” to disputes between three or more parties, and offers his services to help in a territorial dispute between three nations in the Balkans who are negotiating under British oversight.

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

The Win/Win Situation

Quotes

From the afterword:

Game theory and related branches of mathematics have made great strides in recent decades. Perhaps where the visionaries of the early twentieth century fell short in their attempts to design new and better societies in which war and want would be unknown, those of the twenty-first, equipped with better knowledge, may yet succeed.

Transnational Thursday for May 7, 2026

36 comments - 797 thread views 7d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

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In Summary

The Case of the Unfortunate Businessman (Chapter 1)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

The Case of the Gambling Nobleman (Chapter 2)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

The Case of the Surprise Heir (Chapter 3)

Framing Story

Topics

Quotes

The Case of the Ancient Mariner (Chapter 4)

Framing Story

Topics

Quotes

The Case of the Unmarked Graves (Chapter 5)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

The Case of the Martian Invasion (Chapter 6)

Framing Story

Topics

Quotes

Three Cases of Unfair Preferment (Chapter 7)

Framing Story

Topics

Quotes

The Execution of Andrews (Chapter 8)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

Three Cases of Relative Honor (Chapter 9)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

The Case of the Poor Observer (Chapter 10) and The Case of the Perfect Accountant (Chapter 11)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

Three Cases of Good Intentions (Chapter 12)

Framing Story

Topics

Author's Book Recommendations

Quotes

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Why are you called The Motte?

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