DISCLAIMER: This piece has turned into something of a lengthy retrospective focused primarily on the evolution of various laws and regulations that affect mental health care and as such, may not satisfy your particular curiosity. Feel free to skim if you'd like, where you'd like, and to ask questions about the areas and issues that are important to you. My opinions are entirely my own and my hope is that this piece will nevertheless generate more robust discussion, perhaps leading to other, more comprehensive pieces if warranted, and that you'll read it all anyway, but it will probably take a long time--you might want to get some snacks.
I.
According to Wikipedia, deinstitutionalization in the United States began in earnest in the 1950s thanks to a combination of increasing social awareness of overcrowding, poor living conditions for the mentally ill and the like, the high cost to society of incarcerating the mentally ill, and the promise of new antipsychotic medications. On a side note, one of my coworkers had been a nurse at the time the first wave of antipsychotics came into wide usage at the mental hospitals of the mid-twentieth century and she informed me that the arrival of these medicines was widely known as "when the screaming stopped" to those in the field at the time. To further the process, the Community Mental Health Act was passed in 1963 to establish grants for states to build local community health centers under the overview of the National Institute of Mental Health. It was believed at the time that it was better, when possible, for the mentally ill to both live and receive treatment in their local communities and perhaps serve as fully functional members of society. Meanwhile, landmark lawsuits were being pursued, some of them by the ACLU, that would further alter the legal landscape pertaining to mental illness, culminating in O'Connor V. Donaldson, the landmark 1975 Supreme Court ruling that held that an individual could not be incarcerated against their will unless they were in imminent danger of harming themselves or others or could not care for themselves. The decision was unanimous.
I can't help but wonder if Stewart, Burger, Marshall, Douglas, White, Brennan, Powell, and Rehnquist understood or appreciated at the time the extent to which their ruling would transform issues of mental heath and institutional mistreatment into issues of law enforcement and homelessness.
It is 1999 and I have been hired as a computer technician by my local community service center. I have no idea what my employer actually does, but the answer is that we provide access to psychiatrists, case management services for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, group therapy for substance abuse, screenings for those who might potentially require involuntary hospitalization, a parent-infant education program, two psychosocial day centers at the north and south ends of our territory, and additionally run three separate inpatient programs--one for children, one for adults, and one specifically to help patients discharged from state mental hospitals to live in a group setting and, if possible, transition to living independently. We serve several counties and one city.
My employer was founded in the early seventies and is funded mostly with Federal dollars through a combination of Community Service Block Grants, funneled through a state department specifically for the mentally ill,the developmentally disabled and those with substance use issues, Medicare and Medicaid dollars which are funneled through another state department, and (a small amount of) local tax dollars from the city and the various counties that we serve. Moreover, the Mental Health Parity Act has recently been signed into law, requiring insurance to cover mental health treatment at the same level of funding that the cover physical health treatment. Other localities differ in their services offered by virtue of receiving more/better local funding for their particular community service center. Our funding, by comparison, has always been lacking.
I don't know this at the time but despite our poor level of funding, these are the salad days four our mental health center and I have arrived just in time to witness them. Our various clinics seem to be run well and we provide a variety of services to our area, though they tend to be on the basic side aside from those that are funded by specific grants. Deinstitutionalization is still a big Thing and our state run mental hospitals are still working to discharge folks that are deemed to be no danger to themselves.
Of course, all is not sunshine and roses. Water cooler gossip is an easy vice and can range from the mostly harmless amusement at a particular client's peccadilloes (such as the client with the delusion that Jesus was a member of Kool and the Gang) to more busybody-like criticism and denigration. We have staff that get too directive, too aggressive, and too involved in the lives of their clients. HIPAA security rules are (presumably) still being written and argued over and for all practical purposes our client records are protected solely by the honor system with no checks and balances in place to protect client confidentiality. Most of the staff I interact with, however, are pleasant kindhearted, and earnest in their performance of their jobs.
Everything seems to be running smoothly at first. So smoothly, in fact, that the executive director resigns because he feels he has nothing major left to do or build. Soon afterwards, the dot com bubble pops and the economy tanks. In reaction, our funding is cut severely and even taken back in the midst of the current fiscal year. Salaries are frozen and layoffs are imminent. Funding and grants for many programs dry up, forcing us to close them. Throughout my tenure here, this pattern will cyclically repeat itself.
II.
It almost goes without saying that there is plenty of controversy surrounding pyschiatry specifically and the concepts of mental health and mental illness in general. One of these is the use of the medical model of mental illness, which is essentially the belief that mental illness and mental disorders are rooted in biological issues. The overwhelming success of the first wave of antipsychotics and the clear successes of the second wave of antidepressants has greatly bolstered this model of treatment. Accordingly, we are tasked with reporting many things that focus on behavioral and social issues by the department that controls the block grant funding, while also reporting the required medically focused data to the department of Medicare and Medicaid as we bill for our services. In fact, we are considered healthcare providers from a legal perspective and are bound by all relevant laws and regulations pertaining to the healthcare industry.
It is 2003 and I have been promoted from computer technician to MIS (Medical Information Systems) Specialist and we have hired another person into my old position. In the wake of the earlier fiscal shock, our new Executive Director is emphasizing running our service organization more like a business. Things are changing! Even now it is obvious that we will need more in the near future; HIPAA has mandated the move to EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) code sets and rules, which are a twisty maze of specifications and regulations which I would encourage you to peek at in the link just to get a feel for the complexity--the relevant parts are under the "transactions and code sets rule" in Title II. Fortunately for us, our medical practice based software, a sturdy old RPG based platform running on Unix, has been bought by $Big_Online_Company and is a planned centerpiece of their entry into the new world of EDIs and Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Implementing this will be a huge task and will involve things like deploying a wireless network, a fleet of powerful SCSI-based scanners to convert paper records into electronic records, almost tripling our PC inventory as each clinician will now be using Word to write electronic notes, etc.
On the clinical side, we are recovering from the rescinded funds of the dot com bust. Our only remaining residential program is the long-term inpatient group home for those discharged from state mental hospitals, though that is still going strong. Deinstitutionalization in general is about to wind down as the state reaches its target bed numbers but is still a Thing for the moment, and discharge assistance funds are still available. Some good people have left, and in some cases have been replaced by some not-as-good people and the clinics in question have suffered as support for clients and clinical staff has worsened. Time passes.
It is 2005 and my boss is making a presentation on the triumphs and challenges of implementing an EMR at a statewide conference on the bright new future of healthcare technology. Our experience has been a mixed bag at best, to put it kindly, and has taught us many lessons. Staff had a high level of uncertainty about using an entirely electronic system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they work. Some clinicians have been able to adopt to using PCs to do their work while others can not or will not adapt well to using a PC. Some staff quit outright, while others in the latter category remain and generally become a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. Converting existing paper records to scanned records is an ongoing and tedious process, and has the benefit of being accessible by anyone but also can be harder to read, especially when the material is handwritten. Mistakes are still made in the electronic record but can sometimes be harder to correct due to the stringency of some rules and regulations surrounding the editing of data and notes. It is, however, easier for mistakes to be caught by reviews and compliance given the increased accessibility to all charts. It is also easier for staff to violate the privacy of clients by viewing client data that they shouldn't be viewing and in our particular case would require strong oversight and enforcement from compliance with the backing of upper management in order for us to maintain reasonable safeguards. Ultimately, it has made some things easier and some things harder, but overall it has definitely created a heavier burden for our entire organization, by at least an order of magnitude, than the old paper system that preceded it.
Aside from our presentation, however, most of the conference is abuzz about the positive impact that technology can and will have on healthcare in the future. Health Information Exchanges (HIE) will soon allow us to exchange client information with each other through the magic of a standardized data format, HL7! Federal funding will assist us with building and accessing this bright new future for healthcare! Other presentations from statewide efforts to share data with medicaid departments in other states are more positive than our own experience! Speaking of data, a statewide initiative to consolidate and standardize disparate data requests and requirements into a single, unified set of sixty to eighty-odd data elements is underway. The paper surveys that I initially collated as a bored junior staff member have mushroomed, often into Excel spreadsheets, and have become burdensome and difficult to complete in a timely fashion and it is hoped that a common data set will satisfy future requirements and alleviate some of the survey burden.
Moloch has entered the chat.
III.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, aka the Stimulus) has been passed. Because EMRs have been found to be costly, inefficient, and relatively user-unfriendly, the Health Information Technology for Clinical Heath Act (HITECH), enacted under Title XIII of the ARRA, provides funding for the healthcare industry at large to adopt systems that provide adoption of an Electronic Health Record (EHR-if you're wondering what the difference is between an EMR and an EHR, you're not alone). Additionally, it provides additional funds over the course of several years if doctors can meet the standard of Meaningful Use. Conversely, adopters of an EHR whose doctors do not demonstrate meaningful use will be docked a small but increasing amount of Medicare funds.
It is 2010 and I am attending another data conference. My boss has sent me here specifically to attend a presentation from another service center on the triumphs and challenges of moving on from their ancient database and implementing a modern EHR-based system. It turns out that staff had a high level of uncertainty about using an entirely electronic system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they worked. Some clinicians were able to adopt to using PCs to do their work while others could not or would not adapt well to using a PC. Some staff quit outright, while others in the latter category remained and generally became a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. The presenter and implementation lead suffered a heart attack in the course of the implementation, in no small part due to his overall stress levels as project lead. Ultimately, it has made some things easier and some things harder, but overall it has definitely created a heavier burden for their entire organization, by at least and order of magnitude, as opposed to the old paper system that preceded it. It is all familiar to me and I strongly suspect that I was sent at least partly to gloat commiserate about the common difficulties of modernizing.
Despite being further down this path ourselves, dealing with our administrative burden is beginning to be a struggle. Medicaid regulations have begun to inexorably creep into our documentation requirements and to make matters worse, are often overlapping given the variety of services that we provide, contributing to staff confusion and clerical errors. The initial sixty-odd data elements that were standardized are growing quickly and are poorly understood by staff, and I am tasked with tidying up the data that we send on a monthly basis to minimize rejections. I frequently and shockingly encounter pushback from even supervisory level staff on things like the proper Axis for a diagnosis, how to classify drug diagnoses, and the difference in terms of art like Serious Emotional Disturbance and Serious Mental Illness, which in point of fact is a strictly age-based distinction. At this point, it is crystal clear to me that the majority of behavioral staff are terrible with concrete definitions and categories and that they are generally a poor fit for such precise data gathering. Worse still, the standard data set has not seemed to stem the tide of surveys that we are required to answer, often with short turnaround times, and in point of fact, said surveys often request data that we don't necessarily collect at all.
Client care suffers as staff are spending ever-increasing amounts of time doing documentation to meet the increased regulatory burdens. Despite trying to run our centers as a business, our funding has remained relatively stagnant. The populations of our counties and city, on the other hand, have continued to grow, also increasing our workload. Two of the counties we serve now qualify as suburbs! Another program has closed and worse still, an unhealthy us vs. them mentality has become pervasive throughout our organization. Staff are largely ignorant of the state and federal level legal and regulatory requirements that have led to the current administrative and staff burden, seeing this instead as the fault of our administrators. Lines have been drawn, leadership has clashed, and the losers either resign outright or engage in quiet quitting, pushing their unofficial support burdens to surrounding staff. Unofficial support itself is a huge burden as new staff are regularly hired with little or no technical skills and thus have to learn how to use Windows and Word and how to navigate our particular system on the fly, and most of this burden falls to the clerical staff that have used it since my time here, and the three of us in IT/MIS. We are accruing technical debt at an alarming pace. Things are strained to say the least.
The cherry on top of this unfortunate situation is that our medical practice system has ceased being developed. $Big_Online_Company, perhaps recognizing the size of the field they were playing on, divested themselves of our software and sold it to a $Solid_established_software_company that while good at supporting the existing codebase, has made minimal to no effort to fix bugs, release updates that address glitches and incompatibilities, and otherwise keep the software current, frequently requiring us to implement workarounds and/or stay on older versions of software in order to keep things running. And while $Big_Online_Company did develop a newer, more modern front end for their system, it's still the same old RPG-based code on the back end with all of its inherent limitations, and although it would technically meet the HITECH requirements, it would be an obvious disaster for us to implement absent a large and customized set of code designed just for us.
IV.
In August 2008, HHS proposed moving from ICD-9 diagnosis codes, which are used for billing purposes, to more modern ICD-10-CM codes. The new ICD codes were originally to be put in place by October 2013, then delayed to October 2014, and finally to October 2015. On the clinical side, the DSM-5 is released in 2015, which is an update to the DSM-IV-TR and changes many things and thus is an ongoing source of controversy.
It is 2013 and we have gone through a grueling Request For Proposal (RFP) process to replace our now long in the tooth medical practice system. Our three choices are the aforementioned update to our existing medical practice software based on ancient and hoary RPG, an old and crusty behavioral based system based on old, outdated, and niche Delphi, of all things, and a comparatively modern, web based behavioral system running on .asp and SQL and increasingly being adopted by other service centers around the state. The choice is an obvious one and we are now implementing the web based behavioral system. Staff have a high level of uncertainty about using a new web-based system and likewise, a high level of resistance to changing the way they work. Some workflows require significant change while others will be eliminated entirely. Some staff will quit outright, while others will remain, digging in their heels, and generally become a burden to support staff in general and our department specifically. Overall, however, the new system is more forgiving of mistakes and much more user-friendly than the previous and ultimately, it will make many things easier and only a few things harder. It will, unfortunately, require a much higher level of coordination between the various programs and clinical centers and administrative and MIS/IT staff in order to run smoothly. But wait! There's more! We have decided to demonstrate Meaningful Use with our new EHR, which is a twisty maze of specifications and medical codes that I would encourage you to peek at in the link just to get a feel for the complexity of meeting its requirements. Because I have become the de facto owner of our electronic forms, I am tasked with working with C-level staff in order to develop the required workflows and insert the required documentation into the required places.
Administrative burden continues to increase, as does our technical debt. Our CEO has resigned and a new CEO is incoming, with a desire to place more emphasis on expanding the services that we provide to the community through increased commitments from the various localities and grants and other forms of federal and state funding for various services. Things are changing! Worse still, our state has decided to outsource Medicaid billing to a private insurance company, a move which also will significantly increase our administrative burden. Our once manageable data set that we regularly report is pushing 100 individual client data elements, and in fact we are now reporting ever-more data to ever-more acronyms relevant to various state and federal initiatives in ever-more ways--there are 16 more initiatives requiring their own data, in fact, as counted by our statewide data committee.
Implementation progresses. There are many pain points, most of which are technical in nature and difficult for clinical staff to understand. In our new system. There is much concern for minimizing staff disruptions and minimizing change to workflow wherever possible. As a result, many potential gains are left unrealized. Despite all of this, and due in large part to extended hours worked by the staff involved in implementation, our roll-out is fairly smooth, and most of our major issues are ironed out within the first two days of going live.
Unfortunately, client care still suffers as staff are still spending ever-increasing amounts of time on documentation to meet the increased regulatory burdens. Substance use services are a vestigial remnant of their former selves, and we have dwindled to one staff member responsible for the whole of them, which mostly involves with facilitating inpatient treatment for clients. Worse still, our developmental disability data is lacking as a state, and we have been found negligent in discharge of our duties, resulting in a meticulous and vastly increased amount of paperwork and data reporting, some of which has been helpfully added in by the department of developmental disability itself in a prime example of friendly fire via lawsuit. This is further exacerbated when the developmental disability department funds a state website to authorize treatment for the developmentally disabled and to enter client treatment plans electronically, potentially leading to double entry as all state entities serving the developmentally disabled must send this data to the department. Additionally, the department signs a contract with a leading IT vendor to develop interoperability between their brand new website and the existing EHR systems that various state centers and agencies are using. The specifications are agreed upon, the contract is finalized, and the department promptly violates the contract and invokes financial penalties two weeks later when they change the data specifications. This will not be the last time that this happens before the interoperability project is completed. Time passes.
It is 2016 and my boss and I are attending a workshop about Government Reporting Modernization Act (GPRA) reporting that we must do as a part of our award of State Opioid Recovery (SOR) funding. It is entirely how-to and a complete waste of our time, and also exemplary of the growing expectation that we will administer anything and everything related to clinical functions. GPRAs have several flavors the flavor we use is detailed and invasive in its questions, as it involves substance use and sexual habits. As part of our SOR grant for Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid use, we are expected to administer the GPRA to all incoming clients that are receiving MAT and to follow up with them periodically for two years after termination of services if possible. We bail on the second half of the presentation.
We are beginning to drown in a sea of unintelligible data, administrative burden and technical debt. It is so unintelligible, in fact, that even at the state level they are consulting with their foremost auditor, who had retired, to help them understand their own data requirements. Documentation is now for all intents and purposes a full-time job in and of itself and, just like their pure healthcare based counterparts, staff are compensating either by skimping on their documentation or by working unreported overtime. Developmental disability continues to be a rolling train wreck of continuous updates to data and documentation requirements and non-functioning interoperability between their website and the various EHRs; most service centers including our own have abandoned all attempts to use their own EHRs to document the individual service plans and use the state website exclusively and then simply attaching a copy of that documentation to a service or record in their respective EHR platforms.
Worse still, our state has decided that outsourcing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to private insurance has gone so well that they bring in over a dozen new insurance companies! Ostensibly, they all agree to common requirements but in practice this is not so true, leading to large billing and documentation headaches on the back end. Registration and admission forms are frequently changed, requiring increasing amounts of time both to update and understand. I am darkly amused when I find that different insurers are categorizing race and ethnicity, a data point that has mushroomed in the last decade or so, differently than the agreed-upon state standard as well as differently than each other. But wait! There's more! We are now required to do service specific provider intakes, meaning that if a client is enrolled in multiple services, each service must have its own intake and each intake is supposed to be performed by a Licensed Mental Health Professional (LMHP) type, which requires a graduate degree, significant amounts of time as a supervised resident providing services, and the passing of a test. This is a large and unwelcome change as we already have significant issues with hiring and keeping licensed professionals and even residents, as they largely leave for greener and easier to navigate pastures as soon as possible.
V.
The Excellence in Mental Health Act, a part of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act, was passed in 2014 and established a new model for treating mental health and substance use disorders within the community regardless of a client's ability to pay-the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). The intention is to quickly provide clients with access to services regardless of their status and ability to pay.
It is 2018 and our state has passed legislation to implement the CCBHC model within the existing framework of our legislation and regulation. We're going to provide clients with same day access to intake and services! There won't be any more waiting lists! We're going to skip all the paperwork and use a standard assessment tool (which we must pay a fee to license each provider to use, natch) to assess a client's daily level of functioning. Why, there's all kinds of redundancy in data gathering and paperwork, don't you know? (Shut. Up!) We're going to eliminate all of that and just focus on getting clients in the door and into services! Staff can and should document their encounters collaboratively with clients! Better still, we can use more lightly credentialed peers to provide services instead of more expensive licensed staff!
The consultants responsible for the assessment have frequent calls with us to aid in implementing the required changes. They go on and on in our about how this is so great and how it's going to streamline everything. Pointed questions about existing regulations and laws that stand counter to the streamlining that is being evangelized by the consultants are are routinely brushed off with the refrain of, "well, the state of $State moves at the speed of the state of $State." They are also big on double-checking the law and regulations and like to tell stories about other centers and agencies that have been misled about what they should be doing to their detriment. While they are Not Wrong about this and many other things, the practical reality of the situation is that just as the law is whatever the judge says it is, the regulations and requirements are exactly what the auditors and Licensure say they are, and as we are highly unlikely to resort to litigation in order to resolve our differences, snitches getting stitches and all that, we will ultimately experience minimal gains from this.
As the Forms Guy, I am tasked with filling out a spreadsheet with every single form question in our EHR and identifying each of our forms in which it appears with the goal of deduplicating All of the Things. This turns out to be just shy of 4,000 unique questions, some of which are duplicated dozens of times, usually in free text fields like "notes" or "session details" that cannot be deduplicated. Worse still, many of the forms in question are State built forms and thus cannot practically be altered by those of us that are merely using them to report back to the state and so those data elements cannot be deduplicated either. I already ruthlessly cut redundancy and duplicity where I could; the low hanging fruit has been plucked and despite their insistence to the contrary, the reduction in duplicate effort and redundancy will be minimal at best. Of course, we do discover that absent consistent supervision and training on our existing workflows, staff and supervisors have developed their own procedures and documentation which needs to be brought into line, so the exercise as a whole does produce some positive results, it's just that ideally we'd be doing this ourselves anyway.
But wait! There's more! Medicaid requirements for clients have continued to evolve. Client intakes are no longer required to be service specific but are now expected to be a more comprehensive assessment of client needs. There is a hope among C-levels and supervisory staff that through the magic of Same Day Access (SDA) and the ability of clients to fill out their own forms in the client portal, clients will somehow provide the bulk of the necessary information themselves by filling out these forms! Given that many clients rely on our staff to help them navigate bureaucracy in the first place, and further that most of our staff do not understand the data they're supposed to be gathering from the clients I am beyond unimpressed with the shortsightedness of our collective management. Worse still, I am tasked with developing the client forms that will be created by a committee consisting of all program supervisors. When all is said and done, I have been given almost 100 questions that amount to a wish list of wants from each program. The majority of them are absurd, most especially the substance exposed infant questions that asks technical questions about the development of the baby. The darker, cynical cockles of my heart are thoroughly tickled by the whole affair and amongst those that I think can understand, I point to this episode as a prime example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I break down the questions into six separate client forms that clients will allegedly be filling out themselves while waiting to be seen. As. If.
This is not to say that the idea of same day access and getting clients into treatment as quickly as possible is flawed--far from it, in fact! And there are other good ideas in there as well! They have recommendations for dealing with chronic no-show clients, an issue endemic in our field and exacerbated by Medicaid regulations that disallow fees for clients that fail to show up. Neither do I disagree with the notion that engaging clients quickly and frequently leads to better outcomes than our current system of engaging them on at least a monthly basis. It is clear that more engagement is beneficial to clients on the whole! In the balance, however, this new model of providing services is not without its own issues and problems. Lower functioning clients, for example, tend to need dedicated case management just to be able to navigate their lives. And most tellingly, this new model requires complete commitment to its principle in order to have any reasonable chance of working well. And our state, as is its wont, is trying to graft it onto the existing structure and bureaucracies.
In other words, "Good luck, have fun!"
Apart from this fresh new hell, we are actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data, administrative burden and technical debt. State level dashboards have become a Thing in and of themselves and are driving new and burdensome questions that are too technical for anyone outside of the MIS/IT department to understand with some exceptions for the COO and the CPO (Chief Program Officer). The three of us in said MIS/IT department are overwhelmed by our combination of help desk, clinical, MIS, and IT specific duties; it is hard to pay attention to server patching and security when also doing end-user support, EHR administration, and data analysis as required and none of us have the bandwidth to completely grok the entirety of the responsibilities of the others in our department. Developmental disability continues to be a rolling train wreck of continuous updates to data and documentation requirements and non-functioning interoperability between their website and the various EHRs. Our substance use program is growing with zero concerns about compliance or oversight for all intents and purposes. Medically assisted treatment has become Office Based Opioid Treatment (OBOT) and is flush with continued grant funding and consistent with this growth is widespread confusion amongst substance-use focused staff about how we report the services we're offering, particularly the difference between outpatient therapy, which is individual, and intensive outpatient therapy, which is group-based.
Time passes and with much effort and funding, Same Day Access manages to get off the ground. While we have managed to standardize our intake procedure, surprise, the clients are not in fact doing their own intakes when all is said and done. By virtue of serving disparate masters our new intake process is much more complicated and burdensome than the system that preceded However, we have several staff and a dedicated supervisor handling same day access at one clinic location and on a good day, each staff member can process several intakes each, netting perhaps a dozen intakes a day.
VI.
"Apres moi, le deluge." -Louis XV
It is 2021 and my boss and I are meeting with the supervisory staff of all programs and applicable C-levels to go over the data reporting requirements to which we are beholden. My boss, myself, and the special projects manager are the only ones in the agency left understanding how Same Day Access and its data gathering is supposed to work. It's on all the hot state dashboards and we are getting dinged for it regularly. Worse still, the data collection requirements have mushroomed, and we have gone from relatively straightforward things such as the date of first offered appointment after the same day access appointment to a twisty maze of collecting height, weight, and BMI, performing suicidality assessments on clients with diagnosis of depression and veterans, referring clients out for metabolic syndrome screening if they take psychotropic meds (and most of them either do or will) and reporting the results back to the state, performing primary care screenings, and the list goes on. We desperately want to convey this knowledge to the attendees, especially the complicated coordination that these workflows require in order for the data in question to even be reported at all, but most are busy texting on their phones, reading their emails, doing other work, and otherwise ignoring us. This is bad because not only are we drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden, but there has been an exodus in upper management and the present staff are all that's left to pick up the pieces of responsibility that, at least on paper, was theirs all along.
The bill for serious amounts technical debt is now due and sending said debt to /dev/null is Bad Idea Jeans, which is of course exactly what we're doing. Every summer since the inception of the reporting of these outcomes I have multiple meetings where our system and documentation is blamed for our poor performance on the state dashboards. Every summer I explain that the outcomes in question are multi-step and require co-ordination between the staff filling out the forms and the staff doing the diagnosing in order for said outcomes to even be reported to the state. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you're picturing an old-school flip clock changing its time display from 5:59 to 6:00 and I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher playing on a radio, then you're picking up what I'm putting down.
AT this point, the level of client care we are giving varies based on which particular department is handling the client's needs. We have a spiffy new drug court program that is leveraging our OBOT program and clients in the counties where we have staff in place can enter pretty quickly. In other counties, not so much, but we'll get there. DD clients have their traditional barriers to access and crushing paperwork requirements, which is to say they generally wait years for any sort of significant aid. Traditional mental health client service is, in places, practically non-existent thanks to a nasty combination of COVID policies, which include dragooning case managers into managing telehealth appointments for the doctors and clients one day each week, the Great Resignation, and neglect on our part. Absent strong understanding and supervision, Same Day Access has dwindled and only several folks are able to be seen in an average day. A therapist I know had previously been a case manager a year ago and several of her clients still call her in an attempt to get services, stating that their case managers don't call them back and neither do their supervisors. Said therapist patiently explains that she can no longer even access their charts because HIPAA. She is working with a different population now and simply directs her former clients to file a human rights complaint with the State. This is not the only area where she is de facto performing the job duties for other staff, nor is she the only one I hear this from; my overall impression is that outside of the drug court services, traditional DD services, and access to psychiatrists, we don't seem to be doing much of anything for our clients these days.
It is 2022 and my boss has resigned. My interest in replacing him was tepid at its best and so the friend of $New_COO is brought in to manage IT. Thankfully, I really like $New_Boss as well, because I learn the hard way that I am too burned out to even get serious about finding another IT admin job. Even more thankfully, we've finally expanded the IT department to include a dedicated help desk position and another IT specialist and both are excellent--we might actually be able to leverage the more modern parts of our architecture to streamline some old processes! The CEO is retiring (for good!), however, at the end of the year and worse still, we are having serious problems recruiting and retaining staff for all of the reasons you'd expect, including the increased strain of the ever-evolving COVID lockdowns. We are still actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden and our technical debt is still compounding at an alarming rate. Outside of the growth of OBOT and the drug courts, our client care is still at a low point. In true Orwellian fashion, potential clients are now showing up early in the morning, well before we open, in an attempt to be assessed through Same Day Access and actually get themselves into services. Worse still, the state has launched a new initiative to Unify All The Things and expects us to do their work for them participate in its implementation as the head of the project is not familiar with our existing bureaucracy. This, of course, bogs down quickly due to those pesky laws and regulations that command us to report things via specific processes and in specific formats that cannot be magically done away with. Time passes.
It is 2024 and I am attending yet another meeting pertaining to yet another attempt at Unifying All The Things. The first attempt, predictably, was retired quietly, but this time the state has hired The Pros From Dover and is implementing a data warehouse that is expected to be its source of truth moving forward. The ~120 data elements that we are currently reporting on a monthly basis, as well as a significant number other points of additional points of data from the TEDS dataset, are initially expected to be sent directly to the state on a real-time basis thanks to the magic of HL7. The timeline for implementation is about 18 months.
This time, they mean business.
We are still actively drowning in a sea of unintelligible data and administrative burden and our technical debt continues to compound despite the glaringly-obvious need in the approaching data warehouse implementation mentioned above. Worse still, the eye of Sauron is now upon us; the metrics on one of our dashboards is bad enough that we are on a PIP and will be expected to raise our performance in that metric in particular as well our metrics in general. But wait! There's more! The state is once again consulting with their foremost auditor, who had re-retired, to help them better understand their own data requirements. In addition to the increased burdens of making the sausage tidying our data on a daily instead of a monthly basis, it is reasonable for us to expect to be nit-picked on our inaccuracies and our failures as well!
Drug court and Office Based Addiction Treatment (Office Based Opioid Treatment, being so 2000-late, apparently) continues to chug along. DD clients have their traditional barriers to access and crushing paperwork requirements. Traditional mental health client service is, in places, almost nonexistent, but better than it was. In true Orwellian fashion, potential clients are still showing up early in the morning, well before we open, in an attempt to be assessed through Same Day Access and actually get themselves into services. On the bright side, COVID is officially over and at least our offices are open again, giving clients greater access to staff and better still, $New_New_CEO, in addition to wanting to run our organization more like a business (things are changing!), has implemented a "next business day" policy for returning phone calls and emails to further promote greater access to staff.
Why $New_New_CEO? Well that's a fun story in itself, but the essence is that $New_CEO turned out to be a disaster and a major disruptive force in her short-lived tenure, a powerful and terrible example of the Peter Principle. The bad news is that many senior figures have left for greener pastures during her tenure and though $New_new_CEO is much better (see above) the damage had been done and another large portion of our institutional knowledge is gone. Even scarier, amongst the new batch of senior figures in terms of institutional knowledge is... me. Like the previous senior figures, I am also still performing several jobs (the most concerning of which is the Maker of the Sausage Knower of the Data Specifications) and I, too, am burned out, tired of not being able to actually escape work, and frustrated with the constant stream of new and existing employees that are ignorant about the realities of our work (often deliberately so). And when $New_Management frequently bombards me with questions such as, "where is the workflow," and, "was this communicated," I want to scream at them that as a meager specialist, I have never been management, I have frequently pointed to where our existing documentation lies and have frequently communicated change in the past, and I have never had any actual authority to decide or enact any of this myself at all. And then follow that up with throwing a bunch of things and ragequitting.
$New_Boss recently said to me, "you know, when I first got here I thought there was no way it could be this bad and that you were just being a cynical asshole. Now I see that you were really just telling me the truth."
VII.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. -Reverend William Anderson Scott
The sixties, for all intents and purposes, were a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The issue of mental health services is and always has been a quintessential wicked problem that we can really only try to improve at each iteration. As effective as the first and second wave drugs were in helping to treat mental illness, they have not lived up to the hopes that we had for them. Nor has deinstitutionalization led to universally better outcomes for clients and in fact, although I find the legal principle of O'Connor to be wonderful in theory, I believe that in practice and in the balance, it has been a cruelty to the more mentally ill among us. However, that's not to say that our outcomes are universally terrible. For all of their limitations, side effects, and potentially inflated prices, drugs are absolutely, positively the best bang for the buck treatment of mental illness at the community and society level. They provide relief from pervasive states of consciousness and a stability that clients simply cannot achieve without them. Unfortunately, I believe any greater outcome for any given individual would require that magical "willingness to change" that is, all too often, limited to nonexistent. Throw in a metric fuckton of data requirements that expect dust-speck fine levels of specificity and the whole rest of the medical bureaucracy with its various and sundry deep-reaching regulations and requirements, add in a staff that by and large doesn't have the technical chops to readily comprehend the difference between an assessment instrument and a diagnosis, and you've got a recipe for atrocious records and data that add up to little better than unreliable noise. Which means that practically speaking, a lot of this work is, to paraphrase the old Soviet joke, "we pretend to help and they pretend to be helped," with the real punchline being that on the national level, all of our data gathering is the garbage in, and the policies that result from that are the garbage out.
An intensive deep dive into what remain the Pinnacle of the real time strategy genre, and why I believe it might just be the greatest spectator game every created and most strategically interesting game that currently has an active community.
Internet addiction is something that I've struggled with for well over a decade now. Innumerable days, weeks, probably years, lost to aimless scrolling with no goal in particular. My interests are more "intellectual" than the average social media addict who only looks at TikTok and Instagram, so perhaps my habits are more defensible in that regard, but I think it's still had a significant negative impact on my life and has prevented me from spending more time on things that I actually care about.
I wanted to see if anyone struggles with the same issues, and also share some of my recent thoughts on the nature of internet addiction.
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First, it has to be recognized that the internet can be both a force for great good and a force for great evil. Unlike hard drugs, total abstinence is neither possible nor desirable. The internet made me the person I am today, and gave me so many wonderful, unforgettable experiences. I can't just repudiate it entirely - rather I have to learn to live with it, and take better control of my relationship with it.
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I don't support the use of strategies like apps that automatically cut off your access during certain times of the day. Nietzsche once said something to the effect of, "only the weak man wants to pluck out his eyes to avoid looking at lustful things". It's a sentiment I agree with. Any solution that "forces" you to reduce browsing time is just putting a band-aid over the problem. The goal is to fundamentally reconfigure your desires and dispositions so they're more naturally aligned with your actual goals.
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A key factor in understanding internet addiction is understanding the need to accept boredom. Before smartphones, people used to get bored way more often. Sometimes you'd just have to sit there with literally nothing to do, not even anything to think - you won't always want to read a book, or entertain yourself with your own thoughts. Smartphones permanently cured boredom - scrolling the web is infinitely entertaining, and takes zero effort. It's like a liquid that seeps in through the cracks furnished by boredom and gradually fills up all available space, taking over every second of time that you have. I think that one of the biggest keys to reconfiguring my relationship with the internet, for me anyway, is accepting and embracing that there will simply be times where I am bored and I just sit there doing literally, absolutely nothing. But that's not an excuse to resort to web browsing in those cases.
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I'm currently trying to take an organic approach where I accept that the internet is extremely fun and beneficial, and I will browse it multiple times a day, but I try to consciously remind myself to limit it and make time for other things as well. For example, making short-term plans like "I won't look at my phone until I'm back from my morning walk, at which points I will check websites X Y and Z, and then I won't look at my phone again until after lunch". We'll see how it goes. The unfortunate thing about addiction isn't that any one mitigation strategy is difficult to implement and stick to, but rather that I seem to have little control over exactly what person I'm going to be next week. I always seem to wind up back in a place where, on a meta-level, I simply no longer have a desire to control my web browsing at all and I no longer see it as a problem, so I ditch any prevention strategy and I just go back to unrestricted scrolling. I'd really like to fundamentally reconfigure myself so that doesn't happen anymore. But I don't know how to do that.
I view this as a societal problem, not just an individual problem with me. I saw a family of three at a restaurant the other day, mom and dad and a young boy, and all three of them were glued to their phones, ignoring each other. That made me very sad. I hope that more will be done in the future to raise consciousness of internet addiction, and smartphone addiction in particular.
I just found this place and it almost feels like an internet version of a toastmasters club which is kinda fun. I have a rather unexciting job that gives me hours to fill in the day so I figured I will spend the end of my shift here talking about a thing I am passionate about, and if I don't get chased out with Pitchforks maybe I'll do it again sometime. I did not grow up in an Outdoorsy household my Dad used to say he did enough sleeping outside in the Army before I was born so I suppose it is a little odd that from a young age I have always had an interest and passion for all things outdoors. Hunting, Fishing, Shooting, and camping are all things that I love. I am not particularly sure where it came from maybe I watched Jeremiah Johnson at too young of an age I am unsure.
Anyways the one I do know specifically for a fact where I learned it from is my passion for Antique firearms, as a teenager I was very active in the Boy Scouts and worked on the Rifle Range teaching merit badges every summer. The man who ran the range was a hobbyist with muzzle loaders and had a few Hawken rifles he built from kits. The thunderous whoosh and smoke a 50 cal Hawken makes was mesmerizing from the first time I saw it. He also cast his own bullets for it a concept I had never even thought was possible at 14 it amazed me that someone could make something like that themselves without the help of anyone else. He taught me everything one needed to get started, how to load, how to shoot, how to cast bullets, I was hooked then and there. A few years later I was able to pick up a 1861 Springfield rifle like those issued in the Civil War.
What I think the really satisfying part of shooting old firearms is that you really sort of are on your own. Yes there are a few places that may sell Burton Balls or Paper Cartridges still you will absolutely pay through the nose for them so if you are to shoot anything more than once a year on your birthday you better learn quickly how to do it yourself. I think it really forces you to get a better understanding for how efficient our modern world really is too, if I want to load and shoot 40 rounds in my musket it will take me the majority of a afternoon between melting lead, cutting paper, melting beeswax, and rolling them up to get them set. If you want to shoot your AR-15 you can grab two 20 round boxes and be on your way. Another thing about them is they will humble you and they will do it quickly it's about the only thing about an old muzzle-loader that is fast sure you might be able to stack rounds all day with a .270 at 150 yards but try it with a old caplock. I think this is fun because it forces you to really slow down and learn to become a better shooter there really is nothing like it I would say. Shooting them really does feel like bringing something back from the dead in a way. There was a time when the best of the best could muster 3 shots a minute on a man size target it almost seems like a tall tale anymore like Paul Bunyan but once upon a time it meant you were one of the deadliest in the world.
I regularly shoot matches with some of these old warhorses it normally does not lead to many laps in victory lane as I am simply outgunned but there is nothing more fun than taking a rifle last issued when Garfield was president out to the range, and who knows you might even have the occasional upset. I suppose I will close in saying that if you find yourself bored this weekend try and get out there and make some smoke I bet you'll like it.
The Selfish Gene remains one of my favorite books of all time and although published in 1976 it remains a compelling and insightful introduction to the brute mechanics of natural selection. Richard Dawkins later acknowledged that his book's title may give a misleading impression of its thesis, erroneously ascribing conscious motivations or agentic properties to non-sentient strands of DNA. The core argument is dreadfully simple: genes (as opposed to organisms or species) are the primary unit of natural selection, and if you leave the primordial soup brewing for a while, the only genes that can remain are the ones with a higher proclivity towards replication than their neighbors. "Selfish" genes therefore are not cunning strategists or followers of some manifest destiny, but rather simply the accidental consequence of natural selection favoring their propagation. Nothing more.
Dawkins is responsible for coining the word 'meme' in the book to describe how the same principles behind gene replication can apply to ideas replicating. I thought about this when I read WoodFromEden's post about the origin of patriarchy.[1] Their explanation for why male dominance persisted historically for so long is elegantly tidy:
Men make war. Or rather, groups of men make war. The groups that were good at making war remained. The groups that were less good at making war perished. That way, human history is a history of successful male military cooperation. Groups with weak male bonding were defeated by groups where men cooperated better.
Here too, there is no dirigible trajectory mapped out ahead of time. Cultural values which valorize physical male violence and facilitate its coordination at scale will become the dominant paradigm purely as a result of the circumstances' ruthless logic. Any deviation from this set of values would lead your tribe towards extinction, which accidentally also meant your bards wouldn't be around to write songs and poems extolling the virtues of sex equality. At least not until there have been an extensive change in circumstance.
This "security dilemma" may have been borne out of petty squabbles over hunting grounds in the Serengeti but its ramifications persisted throughout history. Military service today may be seen as a low-status and distasteful profession — quite literally grunt work — but it used to be venerated deeply as a path to honor and a cornerstone of civic duty. This philosophy is epitomized by the recurring and central portrayal of military men in stories from a long time ago (Homeric heroes of ancient Greece, Genghis Khan, Jedi knights, etc.), their deeds forming the backbone of societal narratives and cultural mythologies.
The historian Bret Deveraux analyzed the grand strategy video game Europa Universalis 4 to illustrate the war-hungry reality of the late medieval period:
Military power requires revenue and manpower (along with staying technologically competitive) and both come from the same source: the land. While a player can develop existing provinces, taking land in war is far cheaper and faster. The game represents this through both developing old land and seizing new land requiring similar resources [but compared to incorporating newly conquered land, development is about 4x as expensive while providing only marginal improvements]. That may seem like the developer has placed their thumb a bit unfairly on the scale, but, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006) for pre-industrial societies that is a historically correct thumb on the scale. Until the industrial revolution, nearly all of the energy used in production came out of agriculture one way or another; improves in irrigation, tax collection and farming methods might improve yields, but never nearly so much as adding more land. Consequently, as Gat puts it, returns to capital investment (hitting the development button) were always wildly inferior to returns to successful warfare that resulted in conquest.
For most of history, living the good life meant killing people and taking their shit. The men of martial prowess — those exceptionally good at killing people and taking their shit — were appropriately exalted and deified for the base survival and material gain they were able to provide to their community. Fundamental to this community's well-being is a male's ability to commit acts of horrific physical violence in his individual capacity and to coordinate others to do the same (this too with violence if necessary). Any folklore or morality code which facilitated this core mission will replicate, spread, and become enshrined as humanity's unquestioned zeitgeist. Not because it's the "right" thing to do, but solely because no pacifist egalitarian civilization could have possibly survived to say otherwise.
I've written before about slavery, along a similar vein of Devereaux-inspired historical analysis. Although subject nowadays to some quixotic revisionism about why it existed, there is nothing at all remarkable about slavery's near-universal historical pervasiveness. The only justification anyone ever needed to press another into bondage is the universal desire to have someone else do all the work. Any mythology pasted on top (including institutionalized racism) was always just set dressing. When industrialization made slavery increasingly politically and economically untenable, the moral and legal consensus conveniently caught up.
Consider the chasm with how much material circumstances changed. Promises of milk and honey used to serve as the bounty of divine compacts, but today I can performatively buy entire vats of the stuff and barely notice the financial hit. Cheap and abundant electricity is part of the reason I have trivial access to luxuries ancient royalty could only dream about. Buckminster Fuller coined the term energy slave as a way to contextualize energy consumption by calculating the equivalent kilowatt-hours a healthy human could provide through labor. It's a crude equivalence for sure but with some basic assumptions [2] we can calculate the average American relies on the "labor" of about 150 energy slaves. Well what do you know, that happens to be around how many slaves George Washington owned.[3]
The most fascinating book I've never read is The Secret Of Our Success which essentially argues humans succeeded because we're uniquely adept at making shit up — social conventions, cultural norms, religious mythology, etc. — which happens to be directionally useful.
One of the reasons stone tool technology languished for millions of years is likely a result of the brute limitations of a then-human's cognitive capacity. It took about 3 million years of evolution for the human brain to triple in size; a pace too glacial to contemplate but still remarkably fast for natural selection. By contrast, the pace of cultural memetic evolution is not constrained by the corporeal cycle of birth and death. Once the human brain got swole enough, the jet fuel that really powered the next few thousand years of technological advancement was almost entirely a result of cultural advancement. Our ability to create viral memes, in other words.
I'm an atheist who believes religion is a fiction, but I happily recognize it as a materially useful fiction. The Dunbar limit normally would make us dreadfully wary of any interactions with Person No. 151, a hurdle which would have otherwise foreclosed the already impossibly long alloy trade routes necessary to start the bronze age. BUT if you make some shit up about how Person No. 151 is actually totally cool to trade with because they're of the same religion or K-pop fandom or whatever, the cultural fiction is soothing enough for your flighty lizardbrain to let its guard down. Keep this up long enough and maybe pencils can exist.
Our mind's rational capacity to observe patterns, question assumptions, and test hypotheses provides us with an envious advantage in mastering the physical world with everything from tracking game to optimizing steam turbines. But paradoxically as Gurwinder notes in his highly-recommended essay Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things, the very same intelligence can become an effective source of delusion:
As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call "Fashionably Irrational Beliefs" (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being.
Unlike George Washington, I don't support slavery (please clap). But also unlike Washington, I conveniently happen to benefit from a dense tapestry of infrastructure and tendinous globe-spanning supply chains affording me near-immediate satisfaction of my most trivial of whims. Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do. Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:
A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn't want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by "whipping the devil" out of them. It's an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.
The cynical ramifications of my argument might be impossible to avoid completely. Perhaps acknowledging how much our technological milieu guides our moral spirit could beckon us to intensify our agentic nature. To the extent the field of evolutionary psychology can be deployed to shed light on past and present mysteries, perhaps it can shed insight into the future too?
But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?
[1] As Scott Alexander noted: "If you're allergic to the word "patriarchy", reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels."
[2] The average per capita consumption in the US is 300 million BTUs. A human can sustain 75 watts of work over 8 hours, which translates to 2,047 BTUs of energy per day. If we generously also give our energy slaves the weekends off, that's 260 days times 2,047 BTUs, or 532,220 BTUs of energy per year. I very likely fucked this up but I stopped caring hours ago.
[3] Another crude equivalence, but Washington's net worth in today's dollars is around $700 million, far outstripping every other US president until Trump showed up.
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I'm going to talk about what the Boring Company is doing and why I think it is not only not a terrible idea, but actively a good idea!
Preamble:
This is a complicated idea with a lot of moving parts, both metaphorically and literally. You will have totally reasonable questions! Hopefully they will be answered by the time I reach the end, but keep reading until you get to the end; in written format I can only answer questions one at a time, and your specific question might take longer to get to.
In addition, this is describing the system that I think Elon Musk is working on. He hasn't announced that this is what he's working on - it's guesswork and theorycrafting by me - but there is some evidence to it.
A summary: Elon Musk is attempting to redesign urban and suburban transportation on a grand scale, so thoroughly that the majority of commuters choose to use this system because it's better. This is not a thing you accomplish by building a few tunnels under Las Vegas. The Loop is a prototype of a prototype of a prototype; the beginnings can be seen there, but claiming his plans are invalid because of Loop's problems is like criticizing the concept of trains based on Locomotion #1's terrible speed.
Elon Musk has a unique goal: to make a fast inexpensive public transportation system.
Uber and Lyft have a similar goal! They want to make a fast public transportation system, and they have succeeded! They don't care about inexpensive, and in fact they can't accomplish inexpensive, because drivers are expensive. They're working on self-driving vehicles, and this will help, but it won't solve the issue because Uber and Lyft need lots of roads, roads take up land, and land is also expensive. Note that land isn't just financially expensive, it's valuable - we only have so many square meters of sunlight surface on this planet, and it's a shame we're using it on transportation. This is opportunity-cost even if we don't normally count it as a cost of roads; it's kinda factored in right now because we don't have an alternative, but we could have an alternative and we should consider land usage as part of cost.
Car manufacturers also have a similar goal! They want to make a fast inexpensive transportation system, and they have succeeded! They've abandoned "public" by requiring people to buy into the system with a large upfront expenditure (specifically, "buying a car".) This allows them to get rid of that whole "pay for a driver" thing - the passenger is the driver. It's not as inexpensive as it could be, though, because cars need lots of roads, thus land, thus expense.
Public transport systems also have a similar goal! They want to make an inexpensive public transportation system, and they have succeeded! But it's not fast. In fact, it cannot be fast. Group transportation is intrinsically slow; putting more people on a vehicle either requires frequent stops which slows down everyone else on board, or it requires stops at junction nodes which implies transfers which also take a lot of time. Short-to-mid-distance buses, trains, and subways cannot match uncongested cars, and you can test this on Google Maps by going to a city of your choice, picking two positions, and twiddling with the "Start At" option until you find the fastest times for cars and the fastest times for public transportation; in almost all cases, cars are significantly faster, and I've never found a case where cars are more than a minute slower.
(Airplanes have the same problem, but they're fast enough that people put up with it; nevertheless, an airplane trip still involves an hour or two of bureaucracy and waiting on either side, and chances are good you're not landing at the exact time you'd prefer to. Long-distance trains also have the same problem and the same solution, specifically, "we put up with it because the speed makes it worth it". In both cases, avoiding all that added complexity would make them significantly better. If you can think of a way to accomplish that without a drastic price increase you will become extremely rich.)
tl;dr: Transportation has traditionally been "fast, inexpensive, public; pick two", and Elon Musk is trying to pick all three at the same time.
The Basic Idea
If you haven't heard of the Boring company or the Las Vegas Loop, here's the concept:
Elon Musk thinks tunnels can be built for much cheaper than they previously could be. He is building a large underground network under Las Vegas, with something like 45 stops (this number keeps increasing as they add more to the plan). You will walk up to a stop, request a car, and travel to any other stop in the network. You can do this today, although right now they only have 3 stops, but construction continues.
This is literally the basis of the plan; "let's make tunnels and drive cars through them". I acknowledge this sounds dumb, but it may actually be the best way to accomplish Fast, Inexpensive, and Public.
Let's tackle the easy ones first.
Boring Company tunnels are public because you don't need to buy in with a large investment to use them. You can just show up at a stop, pay a fare, and ride a vehicle to wherever you want to go.
Boring Company tunnels are fast . . . sort of . . . because it's point-to-point transportation. The vehicle is ideally already at the stop, or close by, when you request it, and it takes you directly to your destination, as long as your destination is on the system. This "on the system" limitation is a flaw! We'll get back to that, though.
Boring Company cars currently require drivers, which is expensive. They've said multiple times that this is a stopgap until they have self-driving working. I see no reason to doubt them and the rest of this post is going to take on faith that they'll get self-driving working. Again, prototype of a prototype of a prototype. If you're skeptical about self-driving in general, note that as of this writing there are multiple companies running public services in multiple cities; if you're skeptical about Tesla self-driving, well, me too, but they can always license it. I'm going to just accept this part as solved-in-the-next-decade-one-way-or-another.
Boring Company tunnels are inexpensive because oh god this is where the complicated part starts
Price
Tunnels are, traditionally, very expensive.
There's a lot of reasons for this. Cost disease, in general, is one of the big ones, and if Boring Company gets hit by cost disease then this entire thing might be doomed. I think they're more resistant to this because they are not having cities come to them asking for services, they are going to cities to propose services, and if they're expensive, they won't get any contracts. Note that Boring Company has already turned down a contract because the company was going to waste a lot of money on things that weren't the tunnel, and they just didn't want to be a part of that. I'm going to just cross my fingers that this doesn't happen.
Tunnel size is another big one. Tunnels get much more expensive as they get larger. Train tunnels need to be surprisingly large; they need to hold a train that's big enough for people to stand up in and walk around in. They also need to hold some kind of emergency exit system. With trains, this traditionally hasn't been compatible with the train rails themselves; the cross-ties are a tripping hazard. If you have to run a second extra walkway next to your train then that makes your tunnels even larger. Finally, you need a lot of emergency equipment. The reason this is required is that stations are rather far apart; if stations were closer, the safety regulations let you basically say "look, there's an exit right there, just walk to the exit". Far-apart stations cause significant added tunnel expenses.
The biggest issue, surprisingly, is the underground stations. The most common way of making an underground station is as simple as it is costly:
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Knock down all the buildings above the station
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Dig a giant rectangular hole
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Reinforce the top of the hole
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Fill the top of the hole back in
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Build new buildings on top
This isn't a lack of foresight on the part of the builders, this is actually how it tends to be done. Underground stations are horribly expensive, and this has consequences for the rest of the system. Remember how I kind of skimmed past "far-apart stations cause significant tunnel expenses"? Well, they do, but this is still cheaper than building more underground stations!
This is how the Boring Company is going to solve tunnel price:
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Cars are much smaller than trains [citation needed] and don't require as much sheer size.
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Cars travel on concrete, not rail, and this surface is perfectly suited for passenger exit, meaning that you don't need an extra passenger lane as long as there's enough room to get past the cars. (Note: in the current Loop tunnels, there is, even though it's not obvious in a lot of the videos that have been posted. It's not comfortable, but it's enough for emergency evac.)
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We can reduce the necessary emergency equipment by having frequent stations. Trust me on this for now! I'll get back to this one very quickly.
All of this put together makes Boring Company tunnels a whole lot cheaper than train tunnels.
Stations
Twice, now, I've glossed past issues with stations. The Las Vegas Loop requires stations at every stop so people can get on and off; our emergency system also requires frequent stations. These can both be solved by having lots of stations.
but wait, I thought stations were expensive Nope! Stations are cheap. Underground stations are expensive. The solution is that you just put your stations above-ground. Any parking lot can become a station terminal, as can underground floors of already-constructed buildings.
This works for Boring Company cars because car station positioning is far more flexible than train station positioning is. Train stations have to be long because trains are long; cars are short and so car stations can have basically any layout. Trains run on rails, which have extremely low friction - this is good from an efficiency perspective, but means that trains cannot handle significant slopes without expensive equipment like cable cars. If trains can't handle slopes then above-ground stations for underground rails simply aren't possible. Meanwhile, the minimum footprint of a full-fledged aboveground car station connecting to an underground network is the same footprint as a small house; a tunnel up, a tunnel down, and a few parking spaces, done.
Now we have cheap stations! We can toss a station at every casino on the Las Vegas Loop and not think twice about it. Our tunnels become smaller because we don't need as much emergency equipment, and our trips are faster because you can enter and exit from the cars in more places.
This is a reasonable solution. But it's not a great solution. We still have to drop people off at stations and pick people up at stations; what if someone doesn't have a station nearby? What if someone wants a car from their house off in a suburb or true rural area? Do we need to build tunnels to every single neighborhood, and then require that people walk across half their neighborhood to get home? It's 108 degrees out right now, I'm not walking in that weather. Screw that. And worst, we still need significant land dedicated to this system for the parking-lot terminuses, and land, as I've mentioned, is expensive.
We can do better.
Stationless Point-To-Point
This is where I move into speculation territory. But I really do think this is the plan.
We have an underground network of self-driving vehicles. We have cheap entry and exit tunnels. This is all we need to finish the entire system.
We keep our entry and exit tunnels, and we put them everywhere (which also solves our emergency exit requirements.) However, we get rid of the stations. The tunnels are simply a way of transiting from the underground network to the aboveground road network. "The aboveground road network", you ask? Sure; we're going to co-opt the aboveground road network for part of this. We're not using it for long-distance travel, so we can get rid of the giant tangles of freeways and onramps. But we are using it for last-mile travel, because it's there.
When you request a vehicle, one shows up at your doorway. You get inside and it heads to the nearest convenient tunnel entrance. Most of your trip is spent underground, and then it pops back up into the sunlight to bring you straight to your destination.
No stations, low land usage, point-to-point congestionless travel.
That's the actual goal.
Common Objections
Moved to its own comment due to character count limitations.
Conclusion
The goal of the Boring Company is to make the first fast inexpensive public transportation system. Cars are fast and kinda inexpensive, but not public; Uber/Lyft are fast and public, but expensive; trains and buses are inexpensive and public, but not fast. Elon Musk is trying to get all three at once, and the decisions being made are in service to that. The thing being designed really could not exist before self-driving vehicles; it is a truly 21st-century transportation system and hopes to redesign the urban landscape on a level that we haven't seen in a century.
I have no idea if it will succeed.
The Psychiatrist Goes To a Pub
Serendipity is a grossly underrated factor in life. I've been in Small Scottish Town for about 6 months now, and trawled the local bars about as many times.
Said Small Scottish Town has had a trajectory roughly representative of the whole. All the kids fled for the Big City at the first opportunity, the High Street had seen better days if not better highs. It was kept running mostly by pensioners, and middle-aged couples returning to their roots now that they wanted kids away from the hustle and bustle of urban life. It had about a ratio of 1:2000 bars per capita, down from a ratio of closer to 1:400 that was its absolute peak before Covid culled the herd. It was pure survival of the fittest, 27 bars brought down to four, or enough of the pensioners retired from drink by virtue of death. You can't buy a new set of clothes, but you sure can get still get drunk there. This is a story of how I did.
I've been a good little boy for the duration of my stay in Scotland, and very rarely has the desire to haunt the local watering holes overtaken me. I had a shitty day at work, and the weekend beckoned, so I decided to stop by and have a drink. Perhaps two or three, as the mood took me.
I wandered up to a new pub, notable only in that a pint of Tenet's was half a pound cheaper than the last one I visited. As I approached the doors, I was greeted by a gaggle of regulars who had clearly popped out for a smoke. Notable among them were a lady who was well past inebriated and into loud drunk territory, and a bald and well-built gentleman, who if slightly past peak bouncer age, wasn't at the point it was unbelievable.
There I came, lugging a backpack full of random junk, NHS ID card flapping in the wind. I was just about to walk through the doors, when the lady accosted me and demanded that I show her my ID before I could enter.
This was eyebrow raising to say the least, the last time I was carded was back when I was 16, but I'm nothing if not long-suffering. I was just about to produce my government issued residency permit, a fancy piece of plastic that proclaimed with holographic probity that I was an alien with temporary reprieve in the nation, when she guffawed, embraced me in a bear hug, and explained that she was having me on. I laughed, and said that it's been a good while since I was asked to show ID, my haircut must have done wonders.
Piss-takes are nothing unusual to me, and this town is isolated enough that it's avoided the transition of Britain into a Multicultural Nation, exotic would just about cover the handful of Polish expats and the odd Ukrainian refugee dwelling there. My color and complexion would scream not from around these parts regardless of whatever I said, and I didn't particularly care either way. I'm just here to do my job, and potentially have a stiff drink when it's done.
I went through, relishing the temporary warmth and refuge from the chill. A pint of Tennent's please, to keep me warm and comfy in a country where the sun had just about deigned to stay visible in the sky when the clock struck five.
I'd gotten halfway through my sorely needed drink when the lady who had had a laugh at my expense came in, and took her seat at the counter. She apologized for having me on, and when it was clear I'd handled it with good humor, began grilling me about who I was and what I was up to.
I was happy enough about answering her endless queries. I'd been there for about 6 months and change. I was working in the psychiatric department of the hospital twenty minutes away, and was just about finished with that placement. She expressed surprise at the knowledge I was a doctor, but was interrupted by a friend of hers, another middle-aged lady with as many piercings and tattoos as she had years on me.
It turned out that they all had the same bug-bear, namely the lack of doctors in the area. To translate further, a lack of GPs, the steadfast and underpaid bedrock on which the NHS stands. I commiserated with her, mentioning that I could certainly empathize with her, even with collegial congeniality and pulled strings, I had faced months long wait-times for my own medical concerns, and was aware that years was the norm when it came for waiting times for things that wouldn't kill you outright.
Some more explanation followed, as I explained that no, doctors are allowed to sneak away for a drink at the end of the week, especially as I wasn't on the on-call rota for this weekend.
This was met with hearty cheers, as an eminently sensible decision. I downed my first pint in pleasant company. I would have been content to watch the game show on the telly and nurse my drink, but the lady at the door decided to strike up further conversation. I had nothing better to do, with only time spent grinding textbooks waiting for me back at home.
Eventually, the conversation took unexpected turns. Tattoo Lady revealed that she was a born-again Christian, and expounded on her conviction that there was demonic influence running in the background, which compounded existing trauma and was a likely explanation for why several of her friends had been the victims of sexual violence. Not just once, but multiple times.
This was a heavy subject, to say the least. I wisely opted for not challenging her beliefs in favor of a quick treatise on Internal Family Systems, a psychological framework for explaining mental illness that I, quite truthfully, explained believed in literal demons, unacknowleged trauma and personality shards (for a more prosaic explanation) being culpable. She helpfully drew up a PDF of an ebook she'd been planning to read on the topic, and even more helpfully, explained that she hadn't read it yet, except for the cover blurb.
At this point, Bouncer Lady wanted to know more about me and what I was up to, I explained that I was a psychiatry trainee at the hospital further down the road. She began talking about her son, a Nurse Practitioner down in London, and how overworked the poor guy was, having to hold two bleeps at night. I commiserated, and said I hoped he was holding up well. She opened his Facebook profile, and showed a picture of him to me. I quite truthfully said he was a handsome guy, and that he took after his mum in that regard.
With the bottom of her glass now visible, she went on to confide in me that he was gay. I didn't visibly react, beyond an oh, but did go on to ask if that had been difficult for him, given he'd grown up in Small Town.
She said it had, though she and her family had been nothing but supportive. He'd been bullied quite badly in school, but had pulled through and was doing much better since he went to uni. She went on to complain that he no longer told her about the men he was seeing, especially since a solicitor boyfriend had rung her up when they'd broken up, and had threatened to commit suicide if he didn't come back to him. Then came an anaesthesist, who had sounded lovely, but had worried the lady sick when she fretted about him dosing her darling boy with all kinds of knockout drugs.
I really ought not to have brought up a recent news story about an anaesthesist who had gotten into deep shit after being caught pilfering sedatives from his hospital, for the purposes of getting it on with his girlfriend.
I did however, have the sense not to divulge what I knew enough of the gay lifestyle down south, especially the fact that party poppers and all kinds of other illicit substances were commonplace. I told her that I hadn't actually met any gay doctors since coming here, but she grumbled that it seemed to her that half of them batted for the other team, at least according to her son.
She told me about the flat he had gotten a killer deal on, in London, and asked me where I was staying in town. I told her that I was renting, and that I lived with X and Y, a couple, expecting them to be recognized since the town was small enough that everyone knew everyone else.
Her face shriveled up like a prune, like she'd bitten a lemon. "They're bad people! You need to move away!"
I expressed surprise. They'd been quite nice to me, and besides, I was moving in a month or so to the big city (by local standards).
She sounded relieved to hear that, but then went on to ask me about my rent. 700 pounds a month, I said.
And what did I get for that, she asked? The front half of the property?
Nope, just a room. A large bed, a now defunct mini-fridge, a closet and a TV the size of my palm that I'd never used. She gasped in shock, and went on to explain that at the price I was paying, I could have had a whole house! She began calling over to the other denizens of the rapidly filling bar, asking them if they agreed I was being ripped off. A chorus of ayes came back.
At this point, she was drunk enough that she began saying that I was clearly a student, like her son, and it was terrible I'd been taken advantage of in that manner. I tried to explain that while I'm a trainee, I actually am a fully qualified doctor and that I do, in fact, get paid. Not as much as I'd like, but I have little in the way of expenses. These words fell on deaf (and drunk) ears.
She began offering that I move in with her, she told me she had a large house with 5 empty bedrooms, and that it was a sheer waste to have them lie empty while I paid out my arsehole elsewhere for nothing. I said that was far too kind of her, but I was locked in anyway, and would have to move.
At this point, she had another half a pint down the gullet, and began elaborating on why my landlords were bad people. Did I know they were swingers?? Had they ever propositioned me??
I reacted by straightening up, a dozen things I'd paid no need to clicking into place in my head. But no, I said, I hadn't known, and I don't think they ever asked me to join in their bed!
She sniffed, saying she was surprised. Then she asked me if I was married. I said, not yet. No kids either? Not that I know of!
Well.. Her son might well be single and coming by soonish..
Uh.. I'm straight as an arrow, last time I checked. I told her that I appreciated the offer, but I'm sure I'd be lynched by all the girls in town who languished in a state of dejection after they'd found out he was gay. She still demanded I move in, as she felt personally affronted by the violation of Scottish Hospitality that my landlords had engaged in, preying on a foreigner who hadn't known better.
I told her I hadn't had much in the way of choices, as the only other listing on Spare Room had been a dingy attic room halfway to nowhere, for 550 pounds to boot. When weighed against the competition, I felt like 700 for a property closer to the center of town wasn't too much of an ask.
I'd been bought a round of drinks, and then bought one round for the table myself. I found myself palpating Tattoo Lady's nose after she complained it always felt congested, and asked her if she'd ever been checked for a deviated nasal septum. No, came the answer, but she had poked a hole in it by doing too much coke in her teens. The grass was greener and the coke was whiter back in the day, she sighed wistfully.
In those days, the stuff wasn't cut and didn't have a decent chance of killing you. Or leaving you K-holing when you'd hoped for a quick buzz. I agreed, and revealed sotto voce that I'd once done a bit of Bolivian Nose Candy in a nightclub bathroom. I'd already been challenged on if it was alright for me to drink and vape as a doctor, and this went by uncontested. Who hasn't had a dissolute youth?
The tattooed lady said she'd been clean for decades, and tried to keep the local kids straight, not that they'd listen. She then went on to talk about her struggles with bipolar disorder, and how she felt that she was often treated in a very dismissive way by women, with particular opprobrium for the typical nosy receptionist types who demanded to know more clinical details before begrudgingly doling out an appointment, just for the sake of gossip. Remember, this is a really small town. She went on to praise a few of the local doctors, though half of them had seemingly retired by the time I came into the picture. She bemoaned the fact that these days, nobody really had the time to talk, and I tried to explain that the NHS, in its wisdom, tries to screen aggressively in an effort to avoid being overwhelmed, and the higher you go, the less time you'll have with progressively more qualified people.
At about this point, I find out that the lady who just took over tending the bar works at the local medical practice. I ask her not to divulge my drinking habits, and she winks and say she won't tell if I don't. I go on to tell tall tales about how, when I'd visited the pub close to the nearest care home, I'd almost been confident that a few of the people drinking merrily were residents with dementia who really ought not to have been consuming alcohol alongside their meds. This was mostly an exaggeration, as the only confirmed sighting was a gentleman who had been seen as an outpatient with early dementia, and his meds were only cautioned when drinking.
I made more smalltalk, enjoying a rare opportunity to observe the locals in the natural environment. I even learned a few things about cultural norms, such as how in those parts, overt displays of affection had been considered unseemly until quite recently. One of the ladies complained about how her elderly father only replied with a gruff that's nice when she told him she loved him. A shame, but the younger generations were better about these things.
I preened internally at some rather effusive praise. I was told I was a model doctor, and that the ladies had gotten a "good vibe" off me from the start, and felt they could open up. I'm not sure how much of that was due to my usual politeness and ability to seem like I was intently hanging on to every word people tell me while my mind wanders, and how much of it was the beer. But I'll take what I can get.
The lady who had offered to take me in wouldn't let up. I asked if she had a partner, experience in these parts telling me it was a more polite approach as compared to assuming someone was married. She told me her husband was a darling and wouldn't say a word if she insisted. I politely reiterated that I'd be quite happy to pay, and any sum below 700 quid was fine by me. She wouldn't hear it. I insisted that she at least talk to the gentleman, and reconsider it when sober, but this hurt her pride, and she puffed up and told me that her word was her bond, regardless of blood-alcohol content. Her tattooed friend nodded reassuringly.
At this point, she insisted it was time to go home, though her friend cajoled her to stay for another round. I snuck in the opportunity to pay for it. In response, she perked up and said that even if I didn't pay a penny, I could cover drinks and make tea as a way of paying my way. I said I was more than happy to do the former, and already was, as a small token of appreciation for letting me know how badly I was being ripped off, but as to the latter, if she expected me to cook she'd better lower her standards and be ready for food poisoning.
She assured me I couldn't be that bad, could I?
At any rate, she said she was going home, and invited me to come with, so that I could scope out "my" room. I said that the gentlemanly thing to do would be to walk her home, and I would be happy to have a word with her husband if he was in.
Along the way, she stopped at a nearby convenience store and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I demurred, but she insisted on picking something, and I said I'll have whatever she's having. There was a bit of a faff at the counter as her phone's contactless payment app asked her to scan her face first, something she was too far gone to manage. I was about to pull up my own card when she figured something out, and I grabbed the bag loaded with wine and soft drinks. It was evident that cashiers were well accustomed to handling the drunk and rowdy, I asked if another Indian I'd met there still worked at the place, but was informed he'd moved to Spain. Lucky bugger.
We went the same route I'd normally take, her house was just a street over. It's a good thing I came along, because she was far from steady on her feet. Along the way, she said something that explained her distaste for my current hosts better than just her dislike of their lifestyle could. It turned out that my landlord's brother had knocked up her sister, and that her family had been embroiled in a lawsuit to establish paternity. This had been before quick and easy DNA testing, and they hadn't been able to win. The father's family had never accepted the kid, but he was older than me now and doing perfectly fine for himself. The rest of the walk was otherwise uneventful, barring her rehashing previous conversation while drunk to the gills.
We came to her property, which I must say is lovely. She let us in, and I was greeted by a small shih tzu, wagging its tail away as I scratched him under the chin. She called over and asked if liked dogs.
Love them, I said. And it's absolutely true, though my preference leans towards larger breeds. This one seemed nice, if yappy, and was happy to do laps around his mistress while she called it all kinds of incredibly derogatory names in a most endearing fashion.
She showed me around, introducing my putative sleeping space with the same enthusiasm as a stage magician or the show runner in a Monty Hall problem. It wasn't terrible, nary a goat nor a super car in sight. A little cramped, but for the price of free this beggar isn't choosy. I was offered the run of the place, though if my present habits are any precedent, I hardly come out of my room.
She produced a bottle of wine and began pouring us a glass each. I asked her where her husband was, and she said he was down the street, visiting his mother, who wasn't doing too well. She tried calling him, but he didn't pick up, so she ended up FaceTiming another woman.
A quick recap followed, and when she turned the phone over to me, I genuinely thought I was talking to her daughter and asked the same. She laughed, saying she was her best friend, but I could tell she was pleased. Accidental flattery will get you anywhere, I say.
She had some kind of role in the educational system, and expressed her frustration at the severe issues she ran into trying to get several kids assessed for learning difficulties. I mentioned that I had ADHD myself, and part of my interest in psychiatry arose from a desire to help out people in a similar boat. I explained that it had taken me three months to get assessed even with other medical professionals pulling strings out of collegiality, but that it dismayed me that kids could go years and grades without assessment and much needed help.
At this point, my would-be host asked if we'd like to step outside for a smoke. I accepted a cigarette, too drunk to particularly hold myself to my usual abstinence, and we went out into their large, but dimly lit garden. She had music playing, and I began to feel growing consternation as she began dancing with me, drawing my hand to her waist and then tugging it lower. She was drunk enough that I didn't face much issue in carefully avoiding it, and once cigarettes burned out, came back in her wake, making sure to close the doors and keep the draft out.
She excused herself, and ran to the toilet and proceeded to relieve herself with the door open. This was awkward, to say the least, and I settled for standing a good distance away and politely pretending I didn't hear her coughing either. I eventually got concerned enough that I asked if she was okay, and was told she was fine, it's just that cigarettes hadn't agreed with her.
She came out, properly dressed, thank god. She asked me if I'd like a coffee, and I agreed, but insisted on making it for the two of us. At this point in time, her phone rang, and I could hear her husband on the other end, saying he was walking home.
I'd just about finished up the coffee when he came in, heralded by the dog's barks, and didn't seem too surprised by my presence. I believe that at some point she'd mentioned that they'd had a guest over. I introduced myself, and he seemed like a decent sort, turning out to be a manager of several offshore oil rigs.
She revealed that she ran a wedding boutique, one I'd walked past while on my way to my last haircut. I take back what I said about purchasing clothing not being an option in Small Scottish Town, at least if you're a bride-to-be.
I apologized for the rather irregular situation, explaining that while I greatly appreciated the kindness his wife had offered me, I felt that I couldn't take advantage of her in her current state, and certainly not without running it by the other relevant stakeholder, her husband (the dog seemed pleased with my company). He seemed entirely fine with it, or at least was too polite to tell me to scram. I guess his wife did have a point about him going along with her suggestions.
His wife interrupted my excuses by saying that it was fine, she wasn't just bringing someone in from the street, was she?
I pointed out that she had, in fact, brought me in from the street. This was duly ignored as a mere technicality unworthy of undermining the spirit of her claim.
At any rate, I think I had been polite enough while trying to decline the offer, and said I'd give the two of them time to think it over. I assured them that there would be absolutely no hard feelings if they changed their mind, and I would probably figure something out in terms of a place to live regardless. If I'd been paying 700 a month for this long, it was clearly within my budget.
I walked back home, and that was that. I probably might take them up on it, assuming that the passage of time and the elimination of liquor doesn't prompt second thoughts on their end.
Inside, I was more than a tad bit thankful that four pints hadn't addled my senses, and that her husband hadn't walked in to find us in flagrante delicto, not that I had been interested.
Nice people, the Scots, and at their best when you and they have comparable amounts of alcohol in your system.
I've been thinking about conflict vs mistake theory lately, especially since the events of October in Israel last year.
I've been particularly trying to understand where support for Palestine (and Hamas, implicitly or not) comes from. Much has already been written about this of course, whether it's the bigotry of small differences or the trap of the "oppressor/oppressed thinking," the hierarchy of oppression, and so on.
What I found striking and want to discuss here though is the strain of thought responding to "how can LGBT+ support Palestine" by declaring, e.g., from Reddit:
It's easier to focus on getting gay rights when you're not being genocided.
Or from a longer piece:
The interviewer asks him, “What’s your response to people who say that you’re not safe in Palestine as a queer person?” Dabbagh responded, “First and foremost, I would go to Palestine in a heartbeat. I have no fear. I love my people and my people love me. And I want to be there and be part of the movement that ends up leading to queer liberation for liberated Palestinian people. If you feel that such violence exists for queer people in the Middle East, what are you doing to change that for that community? The first step is the liberation of Palestine.
I don't claim it's the most common strain of thinking, but to me this largely cashes out as "they are homophobic because of oppression/imperialism/Jews." As an aside, contrast with the way "economic anxiety" plays out in the US.
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side. I'm skeptical of this blend, which seems to essentially just be false consciousness: if not for an external force you would see our interests align.
I think this mode of thinking is becoming increasingly popular however and want to point to the two most recent video games I put serious time into (but didn't finish) as examples: Baldur's Gate 3 and Unicorn Overlord (minorish spoilers ahead)
[Again, minorish spoilers for Unicorn Overlord and Baldur's Gate 3 ahead]
Baldur's Gate 3 was part of a larger "vibe shift" in DnD which I won't get into here except to say I think a lot of it is misguided. Nevertheless, there are two major examples of the above:
The Gith'Yanki are a martial, fascist seeming society who are generally aggressive powerful assholes. A major character arc for one of your team Gith'Yanki team members however, is learning she had been brainwashed and fed lies not just about the leader of the society and her goals, but also the basic functioning of the society. For instance, a much-discussed cure for a serious medical condition turns out to be glorious euthanasia.
The Gith have been impressed with a false consciousness, you see, and your conflict with them is largely based on a misunderstanding of the facts.
More egregious is the character Omeluum, who you meet early in the adventure. Omeluum is a "mind flayer" or "illithid":
Mind flayers are psionic aberrations with a humanoid-like figure and a tentacled head that communicate using telepathy. They feast on the brains of intelligent beings and can enthrall other creatures to their will.
But you see, even these creatures turn out to be the victim of false consciousness--Omeluum is a mind flayer who has escaped the mind control of the "Elder Brain." After fleeing, he happily "joined the good guys." You might think it's an issue that his biology requires he consume conscious brains, but fortunately he only feeds
on the brains of creatures of the Underdark 'that oppose the Society's goals', and wishes to help others of his kind by discovering a brain-free diet.
In the world of DnD (which has consciously been made to increasingly mimic our own world with mixed results), it seems that but for a few bad actors we could all get along in harmony.
Anecdotally, the last time I ran a DnD campaign it eventually devolved into the party trying to "get to the root" of every conflict, whether it was insisting on finding a way to get goblins to stop killing travelers by negotiation a protection deal with the nearby village which served both, or trying to talk every single cultist out of being a cult member. I'm all for creative solutions, but I found it got pretty tedious after a while.
The other game, Unicorn Overlord, is even more striking, albeit a little simpler. Unicorn Overlord is a (very enjoyable) strategy game where you slowly build up an army to overthrow the evil overlord. What you quickly discover, however, is that almost without exception every follower of the evil overlord is literally mind-controlled. The main gameplay cycle involves fighting a lieutenant's army, then using your magical ring to undo the mind control. After, the lieutenant is invariably horrified and joins your righteous cause.
I should note this is far from unusual in this genre, which requires fights but also wants team-ups. It's a lot like Marvel movies which come up with reasons for heroes to fight each other then team up, like a misunderstanding or even mind control. Wargroove was especially bad at this, where you would encounter a new friendly and say something like "Hello, a fine field for cattle, no?" but the wind is strong or something so they hear "Hello, a fine field for battle, no?" and then you fight. Nevertheless, the mind control dynamic in Unicorn Overlord is almost exclusively the only explanation used.
Funnily enough, I think in these an other examples this is seen as "adding nuance," but I find it ultimately as childish as a cartoon-twirling villain. The villain is still needed in fact (Imperialists, the Evil Overlord, The Elder Brain, The Queen of the Gith), but it's easier to explain away one Evil person who controls everything than try to account for it at scale.
Taken altogether, I can't help but think these are all symptoms of the same thing: struggling to explain conflict. The "false consciousness" explanation is powerful, but seems able to explain anything about people's behavior.
My suspicion is that mistakes and genuine conflict can both occur, but this blended approach leaves something to be desired I think. I had an idea a while ago about a potential plot twist for Unicorn Overlord where it's revealed you aren't freeing anyone -- you're simply bringing them under your own control but you don't notice. That feels a bit like the fantasy all of this is getting at I think: I have my views because of Reasons or Ethics or Whatever, and you would agree with me if not for Factor I'm Immune To.
To offset the more serious post, I thought I'd throw in something a bit more narrative and fun. These stories are true, but composite. It didn't all happen the same day, not with all the people mentioned, and not in the same units and places. That said:
It's midnight on a Tuesday. I'm pleasantly drunk in a VFW, arguing politics with Doc and Malo. They're the only people in the unit who would rather do that than chase girls and fight the locals. Doc short, confident, prematurely bald and ugly as a gnome. Hilarious dude, a Napoleon of dick jokes. Malo black and huge, his big dumb face concealing a keen intellect and a first rate education. He speaks the Queen's English with a slight african accent and an aristocratic tone. Me rail-skinny, argumentative and mean. We're a strange looking group, but our military IDs buy us a quiet corner where we close it down, then start collecting our other guys. Pasco and Healy have struck out at the bars, and Po is hiding behind a gas station near the highway. He got in a fight and the cops are looking for him. We pick him up on our way out of Victorville. It's almost two hours back to base, and morning formation is at 0430. Our team leaders will kill us if we're not there by 0415, so we have barely enough time to get back.
I get about an hour of sleep on the ride. Malo drives, he's a bad muslim but doesn't drink. The gate guard wakes me up with his flashlight, checking the long line of cars snaking into the base in the dark early morning. We awkwardly change into our PT uniforms, lots of butts in faces if you want to imagine six drunk dudes getting changed in a moving Chevy Tahoe. Lots of commentary and propositioning. Ahh, the infantry. Gayest pack of straight dudes in the world.
Parked, we stagger out into the company area where the NCOs are already forming us up. We jog to our spot in the formation, our little group splitting. Doc to Headquarters, Malo to first squad, Pasco and Healy to Second and Po and I to Third. New guy, B team, Third squad, Third platoon (Dirty Third!). I'm at the end of the line, farthest from the NCOs. Po is one slot from the squad leader. I look down the line, and I see we weren't the only ones out on the town. The whole squad is swaying forward and back, everyone trying hard not to look as hammered as they are. The First Sergeant is walking out, but I can hear Sgt. Mac's vicious hiss: “I can smell you motherfuckers”.
We're all technically drunk on duty, a court martial offense. We're relying on the informal rule, which is that if we can gut out the morning PT, they won't breathalyze us. There's a thought to sharpen your mind on a cold desert morning. Fall out, and you'll be in the brig by lunch. And first Sar is looking pissed. He's not going to make it easy for us. Yup, he's leading PT personally, and we're running. Fuck my life.
At least I'm a strong runner. No weight to slow me down. I can run this company into the ground drunk or sober. If I'm in the brig, I won't be alone. I wonder if that would warm the guys up to me?
Three miles outside of base, I have a new problem. Somehow, I've hit the perfect level of intoxication, and am feeling no pain on this run. I do need to shit though, and that greasy bar food is not going to wait for this run to end. I spot my chance as we pass over a large culvert where the road crosses a wadi. I dive off the side, slide down the embankment. I can hear my team leader's startled yell behind me, but I'm already down to the culvert. It's dark, I crawl in and paint the walls brown.
No TP, no vegetation, and with this run, I'll probably need my socks. I rip the bottom off my PT shirt to wipe myself with, leaving me with a very fetching crop-top. The unit is hundreds of yards ahead now. I start making up the time, closing the distance. I come upon Healy who has fallen out and is struggling. He looks at me in surprise, “I thought you fell out?”. I grin as I come along side him, pointing to my midriff. “Needed a shit”. He laughs and quickens his pace a bit. We catch up the unit just before it's light enough for people to see us. Hernandez, my TL, is relieved, but I'll still probably catch some smoke later. There's much giggling, whistling and shit talk about my new fashion statement. For now, we're five miles from base, and we still have to run back. Six miles. Seven. Jesus, is first Sar gonna run us twenty miles? At seven and a half we turn back. Fifteen miles and I am flying. A third of the unit drops out, but they're all the family guys who weren't at the bars last night. The rest of us have to finish.
We form back up on the company area. First sergeant stares us down for a long minute before he releases us. I don't know if that's good or bad. From there, it's a sprint back to the barracks, quick shower, uniform of the day, then off to the chow hall, packed this time of the morning. I wolf down two quite good omelets, four very bad biscuits, and something they passed off as sausage gravy. Got fifty bucks says no pigs were harmed in the making of that product.
Back to formation, where we are sent to “PMCS the vehicles”, standard infantry code for “we don't have shit for you to do today, so check the oil on the lieutenant's vehicle for the eighth time this month”. But there are benefits. A pair of boots sticking out from under a vehicle won't raise suspicion, so I get a nice nap on the cool concrete as the outside temperature spikes. Supposed to hit a hundred and ten today, but it's barely hundred in the shade! Fuck Fort Irwin.
Hernandez kicks me awake, and gives me a perfunctory smoke session for dropping out of formation and damaging government property (my PT shirt). His heart's not in it, he doesn't care, but he has to be able to tell Mac that he did it so Mac can tell his boss, and so I do ten minutes of pushups. If that's all the worse I come out of this, it will be a fucking miracle. “Good job on the run” he says “go to lunch”. He can't come down on me too hard for drinking, I buy him beer. He's still only twenty.
For lunch I go back to my room and catch another nap. My roommate isn't there, but I can see the ants crawling under his bedroom door. Filthy fucker. How does he keep getting away with it? I get my room inspected weekly, Lacava has never been inspected. And he's supposedly in a strict company. I've put in for a different barracks room three times already, but they say nothing is available. This motherfucker has pizza stuck to the ceiling, rotting food and dirty clothes everywhere, his room stinks. You can smell it from the sidewalk. I should probably just kick his ass until he puts in for a transfer, but he's the only guy around smaller than me. Not a good look. And I'm new, no leverage, no real friends, no idea of the lay of the land. Might have to ruminate on that one.
Back to the motor pool. We're a light unit, so our platoon only has one vehicle. The PMCS took fifteen minutes back in the morning, but if we go back to the company, they'll find something even dumber for us to do. There's fifteen guys laying around, playing spades, napping, bullshitting. It's a great afternoon. The glories of the previous night are dissected in detail, lies are told, bullshit is called. I come in for a good bit of comedy about my shit-shirt that morning. I play it off, call them fags for getting all excited at a man's belly button. My timing is off, the jokes are flat. But soon enough it's someone else, Pasco getting grilled about that totally hot chick who supposedly blew him in the bathroom that no one else can remember seeing.
1600 the other units are leaving the motor pool, but Hernandez keeps us there. Our formation will be late today, he says, and he wants to see if we can steal some gear from other units' trucks. We find an unlocked victor two lines behind ours from some other unit and strip it bare. Seat cushions, pioneer gear, a donkey dick (long funnel) etc. We'll outfit our PL's vehicle and trade the surplus to other trucks, maybe even the guys we stole it all from. There's only one thief in the Army, the rest of us are just getting our shit back the saying goes....
Formation finally happens around seven, after several more hours of sitting around not doing shit. Infantry in garrison rarely have much to do. Our general work cycle is two weeks in the field doing training, then two short weeks in garrison punctuated by a three-day and a four-day weekend. Then back out to the field, ranges, gunnery etc. Once we get out of the field and get all our gear cleaned and turned in, it's bullshit details and “PMCS” to try to keep all those joes busy. For our part, we learn to stretch every job out as long as possible, because they're only going to find something else when you're done. The stories about hand-painting the gravel are true. When everything conceivable has been cleaned, mopped, polished and checked it's time to get creative.
The infantryman considers garrison to be basically one big weekend, which is why we've been drinking every night. This is not our job, this is the bullshit period before our job. There's nothing important to do, so we try to stay out of the way and enjoy ourselves as much as possible. We'll be sleeping in the dirt again soon enough. There will be no bars, no girls, not even the indifferent but at least hot chow hall slop. I'm gonna miss those omelets.
I get pulled aside at formation, everyone else goes home. Hernandez, Mac and I have to report to the First Sergeant. Just for scale, I'm a boot PFC, Hernandez is my team leader, my daily boss. His boss is Mac, the squad leader. Mac is the Hand of God, and the First Sergeant is his bosses' boss. Literally the Almighty Himself. I do not want to be here, this will not be good. I'm worried about jail, but it turns out someone has finally complained about my roommate. Which means they complained about me. Mac and Hernandez get interrogated about how often they inspect my room. Because Lacava isn't their soldier, they can't touch him, so they say nothing about that part. They do hedge a bit because I've built a recording studio in my closet. I checked the regs and it's technically legal, but first Sar needs a reason to be angry and that's it. He's getting complaints that his soldiers have dirty rooms, so someone is gonna suffer and that someone is apparently me.
The three of them march me over to the barracks and wait outside while I pull every scrap out of my room and lay it out on the sidewalk. Bed, cabinet, clothes, everything. It takes hours. I have to disassemble the bed and cabinet, reassemble them outside, clean the room. The boys are headed back out, they're clowning me, asking if I want to pop down to San Bernardino for a quick one. I give them both fingers and keep working. The cleaning is easy because my room was already clean. My only consolation is Lacava doing the same thing a few yards away. His NCOs ain't saying shit. Now that we're all here, it's pretty obvious who has the problem, and who is just a weirdo. I re-disassemble the furniture, and move back into my own barracks room. It's midnight by the time I finish, twenty-four hours in the life of an infantryman.
Mac and Hernandez have had to sit there and watch me all night. They didn't get to go home, have dinner, see their families. They'll be pissed about that, but hopefully they understand.
In the morning, I'm going to kick Lacava's ass.
“It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided... but by iron and blood.” So spoke Bismarck after the failures of the revolutionary year of 1848, a year whose actors very consciously sought to either repeat or avoid the years of 1793-94. But in this book author Timothy Tackett persuasively argues the opposite – that it was the emotional currents and fluctuations of the French Revolution that ultimately, but not inevitably, led to its bloodiest and best-remembered period.
I came across this book in the library and was immediately engrossed when I realized what it was. For a long time I wondered why there were not more “emotional” histories: monographs that cover an event or time period through the emotional reactions it inspired in the people who lived through them. The French Revolution is in many respects an ideal subject for such a treatment, given that it was a simultaneously transformative and utterly unexpected; but that it also came, not entirely uncoincidentally, at a time of great expansion in literacy and literary expression. The vast number of diaries, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, treatises, etc. that the Revolution produced no doubt made it vastly easier to approach with this framing. The book suggest this itself in its structure; despite it being the central event, it falls to one of the shortest chapters to cover the bulk of the Reign of Terror and the “Great Terror”, as all the previously prolific writers of Paris simultaneously mute themselves in an attempt to avoid Madame Guillotine.
Tackett assumes the reader knows most of the details of the standard narrative; little attempt is made to sketch out the larger situation at any given time and much of the material is structured thematically rather than strictly linearly. It helps to know the differences between the National Assembly and Legislative Assembly and National Convention (for this review’s purposes I will instead refer in general to “the legislature”). The pre-revolutionary political situation is covered in a scant six pages in favour of devoting attention instead to the worldview and circumstances of those who would become the revolutionary élites that the book primarily draws from. They were largely bourgeois, middle-class types: lawyers especially, but also shopkeepers, merchants, artisans. They were religious, but not exceptionally devout. They had no great criticisms of the nobility; they had little inkling or expectation that the current social structure would ever changed, and seemed content to relying on the existing system of noble patronage. They were men of reason, and unlike the peasantry took pride that they were not prone to being swayed by rumour and conspiracy. And most notable of all, Tackett stresses that among those Third Estate members who had written political pamphlets prior to the Revolution, only one – no points for guessing who! - gave indications of paranoia. So what could explain how these devotees of liberal enlightenment found themselves waist-deep in blood five years later?
When the Revolution came, it did so suddenly and by surprise. When Louis XVI called the Estates in order to address the state of France’s finances, the future revolutionaries of the Third Estate only had modest ambitions: lifting of total press censorship, freedom of assembly, greater influence in government for commoners, some kind of permanent representative legislature. The Estates-General convened on May 4, 1789, and after a sudden and intense period of political and class awakening, within six weeks the Third Estate deputies had broken off from the rest and formed a hostile and sovereign legislature, which immediately declared the entire existing tax system as illegal. The famous Tennis Court Oath where they swore to write a constitution followed a few days later, and a week after that the clergy and noble deputies grudgingly joined. Paranoia suddenly grew when foreign mercenaries began massing in Versailles – could Louis merely be feigning acceptance, while preparing to crush them? - but after the storming of the Bastille the King appeared to back down, coming before the legislature to give his blessing to their self-appointed powers. The patriot elites decided that the violence, while unfortunate, had regrettably been necessary. This basic cycle – enthusiasm about reforms, followed by sudden anxiety that they might be reversed, menaced by vast conspiracies that justify further violence – becomes the vicious circle of Tackett’s emotional narrative. One small-town barrister wrote of how keenly he felt the “striking contrast between good and evil, anguish and hope, joy and sadness, which so rapidly follow upon one another.” This turbulent emotional cascade is the throughline of the book.
The years of 1789-93 provided an incredible series of events to feed both anguish and hope. I cannot and will not attempt to write at any length about the course of the Revolution and its consequences because it is beyond the scope of this post (and the book it is trying to review). There’s a reason historians tend to use 1789 as the starting point of modernity. All of a sudden the philosophies which dominate the modern consciousness emerged all at once; from the void stepped out nationalism, feminism, socialism, conservatism, atheism. Even single days could seemingly change everything: on August 4, 1789 a staged speech of a liberal noble renouncing his seigneurial dues resulted in an “electric whirlwind” of changes as other deputies got caught up in the emotions of the moment. By the end of the night not just seigneurial dues but also noble courts, exclusive noble hunting rights, a variety of excise and consumption taxes that were noble-exempt, sale of offices, the entire patronage-appointed royal administration, Church tithes, and a series of other noble and clergy privileges had been eliminated: feudalism felled in a single day. The rapid and unprecedented shifts generated a wave of euphoria among the French commons. An institution that had ruled largely unchallenged and unchanged for over 1,000 years suddenly seemed mutable. Tackett frequently refers to the “spirit of ‘89”: this emergent idealism and utopianism that anything and everything could be changed, that one could create a new future for mankind. He quotes numerous onlookers who were simply stunned by events: familiar themes in the responses were that entire centuries had been condensed into a span of days. Many declared that only divine intervention could have led such a breathtaking transformation; churches across the country held special ceremonies so that people could give thanks to Heaven. Spontaneous instances of collective oath-taking broke out across the nation, swearing allegiance to the decrees of the legislature.
But there were threats to the gains that had been made. The virtually-overnight abolition of all the nation’s institutions did not come without a major breakdown of order. With the traditional power structures dismantled, regions were forced to create ad-hoc replacements of their own, with varying legitimacy. At the same time an enormous surge of new media entered the market now free from censorship, praising ideals of freedom, equality, and abolition of hierarchies. Army units mutinied, police and judges fled their posts, urban workers striked while peasants refused to pay all taxes. Dissident nobles had begun leaving in July and August 1789, fleeing from the potential of violence or seeking the aid of those who might restore their privileges. When the Church was subordinated to the national government in 1790, about half of the nation’s 50,000 priests refused to swear allegiance to the legislature instead of Rome, and many patriots feared what betrayals might fester in the regions these refractory priests held sway. Mass psychosis gave these mainly rural, humble priests extraordinary resources and influence, but some grand conspiracies were true. The King indeed was merely feigning cooperation with the legislature, and in June 1791 made a failed attempt to flee the country, leaving behind proof that he was conspiring with escaped nobles and foreign kings to crush the Revolution. The threat of war from reactionary foreign powers fuelled endless anxiety.
It was this simultaneously chaotic, hopeful and paranoid society that tumbled confidently into a near-uninterrupted stretch of wars that would last a further 23 years. Initially during the Revolution there was an international sense of fraternity: in May 1790 the legislature and agreed that never again would France declare war on a brother nation. 18 months later, a sense of bellicose nationalism was aggressively pushing a war on the entire world, a “universal crusade for liberty.” Confidence was extremely high: “if we firmly desire it, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants” one patriot predicted. The initial failures of the war and the sudden (suspicious?) surrender of key French forts fuelled a rise of extremism and violence across the nation which ended in the toppling of the King and the declaration of the Republic. Just as this occurred, a wave of French victories followed which simultaneously ended the internal violence and convinced the radicals of what they had always suspected: France’s failures were solely due to internal treachery. After the execution of Louis XVI, the now-invincible Republic declared war on Spain and the UK as well. “One more enemy for France will bring one more triumph for liberty,” declared one patriot. It was under this pressure of a four-front war that Paris demanded conscripts from the provinces, sparking a massive and long-feared counter-revolution in the West of the country. As war without and within threatened to consume the nation, the heat turned up on the government: could they secretly be traitors too? A mob stormed the legislature in June 1793 and forced the legislature to order their arrests. This launched a fresh wave of federalist revolts as many cities turned their back on the legislature. Seeing no alternative, the new Revolutionary government – now led by the infamous Committee of Public Safety - announced the levée en masse in August. The entire nation would be mobilized: young men would fight (1.5 million called up in the first round of conscription alone), women and others would support the war effort. The obvious question loomed: if all France’s fighting men were at the frontiers, who would defend the women and children against the vast number of internal traitors? There was only one solution.
Tackett rejects several of the traditional theories for how the Terror came to be. He takes a dim view to ideological explanations: the Revolutionary elites held nothing that could be coherently described as an ideology, let alone one that would inevitably end in Terror. Describing them as “liberal” functions only as a crude short-hand; they did not see themselves as such and some of what are now fundamental tenets of liberalism, like freedom of religion, was something the Revolution only stumbled into accidentally. The participants themselves in their writings and actions more typically drew from Classical writers than from recent Enlightenment philosophers. The Revolution itself was an accident of history and going into it those who would lead it had no inkling that they would oversee or even desire anything more than the limited aims they had when the Estates-General convened. Marxist theories on class struggle are similarly rejected: the most significant period of reforms, 1789-90, featured a legislature that was majority-composed of former members of the nobility and clergy. View of social class was much more analogous to that of immutable race, and many quoted in the book use that terminology exactly; that so many of the liberal nobles who willingly shed their own privileges ended up being executed reinforces this. Nor does he accept explanations that the Terror was the unique product of the external pressures facing France in 1793-94: the Revolutionaries were always much more concerned with internal threats than external even at the darkest stages of the War of the First Coalition, and the bloodiest stage of it was the last seven weeks after the worst phases of both internal and external threats were past. More remarkably, much of France had been largely untouched by the Terror: while some 35-40,000 were killed in the process of the Revolutionary tribunals, six departments saw zero deaths and over a third had fewer than ten. Meanwhile, the west bathed in blood: some 250-300 thousand died in the taming of the counterrevolution in the Vendée.
Tackett devotes much effort to cataloguing the development the paranoid conspiracy mindset that would dominate the Terror. He sees forerunners of this mentality in the wild rumours people would concoct in the early days of the Revolution; at the time they focused principally on murderers and robbers. Several times all of Paris was illuminated overnight in order to forestall some vague mass plot; this defensive measure would be returned to constantly during times of future anxiety. As the menace of counter-revolution grew, nobles and refractory priests took the place of common criminals. After the King’s failed flight, all manner of conspiracies were vindicated. Patriots prided themselves in their eagerness to sniff out betrayal. Various social clubs took blood oaths to defend the lives of accusers, or adopted the All-Seeing Eye as a badge of their vigilance. Prominent writers declared a “declaration of rights of the accuser.” One then-hero, future-traitor Mirabeau wrote “an act of denunciation… must be considered as the most important of our new virtues, as the protector of our nascent liberty.”
The humiliation and fear of trusted individuals being revealed as traitors was a reoccurring theme: not just become some were indeed schemers, but also the increasing radicalization of the Revolution meant to stay firm in your principles eventually shifted you from being a revolutionary to a reactionary. The metaphor of a traitor with a mask being more dangerous than an armed enemy was a frequently espoused sentiment. In the various organs that were set up to process these accusations of treachery, they turned increasingly inward until they were mainly aimed at other revolutionaries.
This conspiratorial mindset aided greatly in the factionalization of France. Tackett makes the argument that such splits – first between the Jacobins and the Feuillants, then the Jacobins and the Girondins, and then within the Montagnards – were largely not rooted in ideology, but rather breakdowns of personal relationships. On the major issues the legislature voted with near unanimity; there was no great partisan split in the actual operation of the country. There was even a charming – if ominous – act of solidarity when all the deputies swore together to die rather than let foreign enemies alter the constitution they had written. Rather, at the beginning of each of these schisms seems to have been some kind of personality conflict, that only later manifested itself into an ideological shift. “There exists only two parties in France,” Robespierre declared in October 1792, “the party of good citizens and the party of evil citizens.” One woman who is frequently quoted through the book and had been brimming with a sense of fraternity in ‘89, later wondered of her former friends, “how could such good individuals have become so vile?” The most outspoken individuals who would take charge of each faction were incredibly cavalier with accusing their counterparts of vast treasons. During the trial of Louis for example, leading Jacobins claimed that their opponents were secret monarchists working on behalf of the King; the Girondins likewise claimed that the Jacobins were being funded by the British to kill the king so they could declare themselves dictators. They never bothered to support any of their claims with proof – after all, why would their enemies be so lax as to let proof of their misdeeds remain behind?
The term “stochastic terrorism” has predictably become abused in online discourse. I’m not sure whether Tackett knew of the term while writing this or deliberately neglected to use it, but it is the one that feels most apt at many points. The term “terrorism” of course comes from this Terror, though the revolutionaries used in unambiguously in a positive sense: “make terror the order of the day!” was a common refrain in fall 1793. But a strong impression I got from reading this book was how reluctant the shifts towards mass violence were. While the revolutionaries were very eager to use vicious invective and happy to level the most extreme accusations of treachery at their political enemies, it was rarely the elites themselves that began the violence. It was the mob that stormed the Bastille, assaulted the Tuileries, massacred prisoners, invaded the legislature. After each of these incidents the elites seemed somewhere between embarrassed and furious. For example, after months of accusations of treason at their Girondin counterparts, when the mob stormed the legislature and forced the Montagnard deputies at gunpoint to arrest these traitors in June 1792, they were still given very lenient treatment (and most ended up escaping their very lax house arrests). While the violence was typically justified afterwards, the elites seemed genuinely disturbed that people would take their words to their logical conclusions. The polemicists were of course to some degree aware of the potential of arousing the fury of the mob, and this was one of the reasons Robespierre targeted them with a purge in spring 1794.
It was certainly amusing to see how much of contemporary discourse on misinformation, press freedom, and conspiracy theories could be fitted (albeit somewhat awkwardly) onto the situation in 1792-93. With the sudden transition from the rigidly-controlled media environment of the Ancien Régime to the total free-for-all of the Revolution, there was a complete lack of social mores, acceptable standards of conduct, and a fundamental aversion to honesty in the wave of newspapers and pamphlets that flooded France. It’s not hard to draw parallels to the present, nor is it difficult to find examples of public denunciations for lack of civisme. So maybe that element hasn’t changed, but this feels like a raw deal: I’ve felt the anxiety and paranoia, but not the euphoria. I’ve never been able to escape cynicism, I’ve never felt that utopian spirit of ‘89. But now at least I can partially convince myself that it’s for the best.
If you've never read a standard history of the French Revolution, I would highly recommend you do. I don't think there's another historical event more instrumental in shaping the present - at least not one so constrained, geographically and in duration. Beyond its importance, it is so rich in drama and twists that it makes for endlessly fascinating reading - even larger histories have to give short shrift to some of the most flamboyant and influential characters. The "emotional" approach to the Revolution that Tackett takes in this book makes for a compelling and persuasive narrative for how the Terror came to be. I would definitely be interested in seeing other events tackled in a similar manner.
I think that UN manipulating it's own index is not culture wars even if the index is related to gender. Let me know if I am wrong.
Human development
The Gender Development Index (GDI), along with its more famous sibling Human Development Index (HDI) is a an index published annually by UN's agency, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Whether an index is manipulated or not can be judged only against a precise definition of what the index claims to be measuring. So how do you measure human development? Whatever you do, you will never capture all nuances of the real world - you will have to simplify. The UNDP puts it this way:
The Human Development Index (HDI) was created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.
So the UNDP defines the Human Development Index as a geometric mean of three dimensions represented by four indices:
| Dimension | Index |
|---|---|
| Long and healthy life | Life expectancy at birth (years) |
| Knowledge | Expected years of schooling (years) |
| Mean years of schooling (years) | |
| Decent standard of living | Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (2017 PPP$) |
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
Gender Development
So far so good. Next, on it's website the Gender Development Index (GDI) is defined like this:
GDI measures gender inequalities in achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: health, measured by female and male life expectancy at birth; education, measured by female and male expected years of schooling for children and female and male mean years of schooling for adults ages 25 years and older; and command over economic resources, measured by female and male estimated earned income.
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/gender-development-index#/indicies/GDI
While in the actual report HDI it is simply defined as a ratio of female to male HDI values:
Definitions - Gender Development Index: Ratio of female to male HDI values.
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf
Let's look, for instance, at the Gender Development Index of United Kingdom. The value 0.987 means that despite longer life and more education, in UK, females are less developed than males.
| Dimension | Index | Female value | Male value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long and healthy life | Life expectancy at birth (years) | 82.2 | 78.7 |
| Knowledge | Expected years of schooling (years) | 17.8 | 16.8 |
| Mean years of schooling (years) | 13.4 | 13.4 | |
| Decent standard of living | Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (2017 PPP$) | 37,374 | 53,265 |
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf
Wait, what?? What does it mean that females in UK have command over economic resources of post Soviet Estonia (GNI Estonia=38,048) while males in UK have command over economic resources of EU leader Germany (GNI Germany=54,534)?
The manipulation
The UNDP calculates separate command over economic resources for females and males, as a product of the actual Gross National Income (GNI) and two indices: female and male shares of the economically active population (the non-adjusted employment gap) and the ratio of the female to male wage in all sectors (the non-adjusted wage gap).
The UNDP provides this simple example about Mauritania:
Gross National Income per capita of Mauritania (2017 PPP $) = 5,075
| Indicator | Female value | Male value |
|---|---|---|
| Wage ratio (female/male) | 0.8 | 0.8 |
| Share of economically active population | 0.307 | 0.693 |
| Share of population | 0.51016 | 0.48984 |
| Gross national income per capita (2017 PPP $) | 2,604 | 7,650 |
According to this index, males in Mauritania enjoy the command over economic resources of Viet Nam (GNI Viet Nam=7,867) while females in Mauritania suffer the command over economic resources of Haiti (GNI Haiti=2,847).
Let's be honest here: this is total bullshit. There are two reasons why you cannot use raw employment gap and raw wage gap for calculating the command over economic resources:
Argument 1
Bread winners share income with their families. This is a no brainer. All over the world, men are expected to fulfil their gender role as a bread winer. This does not mean that they keep the pay check for themselves while their wives and children starve to death. Imagine this scenario: a poor father from India travels to Qatar where he labours in deadly conditions, so that his family can live a slightly better life. According to UNDP, he just became more developed, while the standard of living his wife is exactly zero.
Argument 2
Governments redistribute wealth. This is a no brainer too. One's command over economic resources and standard of living is not equal to ones pay check. There are social programs, pensions, public infrastructure. Even if you have never earned a pay check yourself, you can take a public transport on a public road to the next public hospital. Judging by the Tax Freedom Day, states around the world redistribute 30% to 50% of all income. And while men pay most of the taxis (obviously, they have higher wages) women receive most of the subsidies (obviously, they have lover wages). But according the UNDP, women in India (female GNI 2,277) suffer in schools and hospitals of the war-torn Rwanda, while men in India (male GNI 10,633) enjoy the infrastructure and social security of the 5-times more prosperous Turkey.
Don't get me wrong, the employment gap and pay gap are not irrelevant for the standard of living and command over economic resources. Pensions and social security schemes mostly do not respect the shared family income and as a result the partner doing less paid work - usually a women - gets lower pension, unemployment benefit etc. What's worse, the non-working partner is severely disadvantaged in case of divorce or break up. But while this has an impact on each gender's standard of living it certainly does not define 100% of that value.
Argument 3
You may argue that the command over economic resources measured by estimated earned income is some kind of proxy for all other disadvantages women face in society. But do you remember what I said in the beginning?
Whether an index is manipulated or not can be judged only against a precise definition of what the index claims to be measuring.
The HDI measures "people and their capabilities" and the GDI is a ratio of these capabilities measured separately for men and women. The economic dimension of the GDI is supposed to be standard of living or command over economic resources - neither of which can be represented by earned income alone.
The taboo
Wikipedia says: "For most countries, the earned-income gap accounts for more than 90% of the gender penalty." (I have not verified this.) This is important, because when we look at the other two dimensions it becomes clear that while men have shorter and less health lives they also increasingly fall behind in mean and expected years of schooling. Without the misrepresentation of the command over economic resources value, the index would show something very uncomfortable: that according to UN's own definition of Human Development men are the less developed gender.
PS: Is there a way to give those tables some borders and padding?
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
I've been wrong, again, pooh-poohing another Eurasian autocracy. Or so it seems.
On 29 August 2023, to great jubilation of Chinese netizens («the light boat has passed through a thousand mountains!», they cry), Huawei has announced Mate 60 and 60 Pro; the formal launch is scheduled for September 25th, commemorating the second anniversary of return of Meng Wanzhou, CFO and daughter of Huawei's founder, from her detainment in Canada. Those are nice phones of course but, specs-wise, unimpressive, as far as flagships in late 2023 go (on benchmarks, score like 50-60% of the latest iPhone while burning peak 13W so 200% of power). Now they're joined by Mate X5.
The point, however, is that they utilize Huawei's own SoC, Hisilicon Kirin 9000S, not only designed but produced in the Mainland; it even uses custom cores that inherit simultaneous multithreading from their server line (I recommend this excellent video review, also this benchmarking). Their provenance is not advertised, in fact it's not admitted at all, but now all reasonable people are in agreement that it's SMIC-Shanghai made, using their N+2 (7nm) process, with actual minimum metal pitch around 42 nm, energy efficiency at low frequencies close to Samsung's 4nm and far worse at high (overall capability in the Snapdragon 888 range, so 2020), transistor density on par with first-gen TSMC N7, maybe N7P (I'm not sure though, might well be 10% higher)… so on the border of what has been achieved with DUV (deep ultraviolet) and early EUV runs (EUV technology having been denied to China. As a side note, Huawei is also accused of building its own secret fabs).
It's also worse on net than Kirin 9000, their all-time peak achievement taped out across the strait in 2020, but it's… competitive. They apparently use self-aligned quad patterning, a DUV variant that's as finicky as it sounds, an absurd attempt to cheat optics and etch features many times smaller than the etching photons' wavelength (certain madmen went as high as 6x patterning; that said, even basic single-patterning EUV is insane and finicky, «physics experiment, not a production process»; companies on the level of Nikon exited the market in exasperation rather than pursue it; and it'll get worse). This trick was pioneered by Intel (which has failed at adopting EUV, afaik it's a fascinating corporate mismanagement story with as much strategic error as simple asshole behavior of individual executives) and is still responsible for their latest chips, though will be made obsolete in the next generations (the current node used to be called Intel's 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin, and was recently rebranded to Intel 7; note, however, that Kirin 9000S is a low-power part and requirements there are a bit more lax than in desktop/server processors). Long story short: it's 1.5-2 generations, 3-4 years behind the frontier of available devices, 5-6 years behind frontier production runs, 7-8 years after the first machines to make such chips at scale came onto market; but things weren't that much worse back then. We are, after all, in the domain of diminishing returns.
Here are the highlights from the first serious investigation, here are some leaks from it, here's the nice Asianometry overview (esp 3:50+), and the exhilarating, if breathlessly hawkish perspective of Dylan Patel, complete with detailed restrictions-tightening advice. Summarizing:
- This is possible because sanctions against China have tons of loopholes, and because ASML and other suppliers are not interested in sacrificing their business to American ambition. *
- Yes, it qualifies for 7nm in terms of critical dimensions. Yes, it's not Potemkin tulou, they likely have passable yields, both catastrophic and parametric (maybe upwards of 50% for this SoC, because low variance in stress-testing means they didn't feel the need to approve barely-functional chips, meaning there weren't too many defects) and so it's economically sustainable (might be better in that sense than e.g. Samsung's "5nm" or "4nm", because Samsung rots alive due to systemic management fraud) [I admit I doubt this point, and Dylan is known to be a hawk with motivated reasoning]. Based on known capex, they will soon be able to produce 30K wafers per month, which means 10s of millions of such chips soon (corroborated by shipment targets; concretely it's like 300 Kirins *29700 wafers so 8.9M/month, but the cycle is>1 month). And yes, they will scale it up further, and indeed they will keep polishing this tech tree and plausibly get to commercially viable "5nm" next - «the total process cost would only be ≈20% higher versus a 5nm that utilizes EUV» (probably 50%+ though).
- But more importantly: «Even with 50% yields, 30,000 WPM could support over 10 million Nvidia H100 GPU ASIC dies a year […] Remember GPT-4 was trained on ≈24,000 A100’s and Open AI will still have less than 1 million advanced GPUs even by the end of next year». Of course, Huawei already had been producing competitive DL accelerators back when they had access to EUV 7nm; even now I stumble upon ML papers that mention using those.
- As if all that were not enough, China simply keeps splurging billions on pretty good ML-optimized hardware, like Nvidia A/H800s, which abide with the current (toothless, as Patel argues) restrictions.
- But once again: on a bright (for Westerners) side, this means it's not so much Chinese ingenuity and industriousness (for example, they still haven't delivered a single ≤28nm lithography machine, though it's not clear if the one they're working on won't be rapidly upgraded for 20, 14, 10 and ultimately 7nm processes – after all, SMIC is currently procuring tools for «28nm», complying with sanctions, yet here we are), as it's the unpicked low-hanging fruit of trade restrictions. In fact, some Chinese doomers argue it's a specific allowance by the US Department of Commerce and overall a nothingburger, ie doesn't suggest willingness to produce more consequential things than gadgets for patriotic consumers. The usual suspects (Zeihan and his flock) take another view and smugly claim that China has once again shot itself in the foot while showing off, paper tiger, wolf warriors, only steals and copies etc.; and, the stated objective of the USG being «as large of a lead as possible», new crippling sanctions are inevitable (maybe from Patel's list). There exists a body of scholarship on semiconductor supply chain chokepoints which confirms these folks are not delusional – something as «simple» as high-end photoresist is currently beyond Chinese grasp, so the US can make use of a hefty stick.
All that being said, China does advance in on-shoring the supply chain: EDA, 28nm scanners, wafers etc.
* Note: Patel plays fast and loose with how many lithography machines exactly, and of what capacity, are delivered/serviced/ordered/shipping/planned/allowed, and it's the murkiest part in the whole narrative; for example he describes ASML's race-traitorous plans stretching to 2025-2030, but the Dutch and also the Japanese seem to already have began limiting sales of tools he lists as unwisely left unbanned, and so the August surge or imports may have been the last, and certainly most 2024+ sales are off the table I think.
All of this is a retreading of a discussion from over a year ago, when a less mature version of SMIC N7 process was used - also surreptitiously – for a Bitcoin mining ASIC, a simple, obscenely high-margin part 19.3mm² in size, which presumably would have been profitable to make even at pathetic yields, like 10%; the process back then was near-idential to TSMC N7 circa 2018-2019. 9000S is 107 mm² and lower-margin. Nvidia GH100, the new workhorse of cutting edge ML, made with 4nm TSMC node, is 814 mm²; as GPU chips are a strategic resource, it'd be sensible to subsidize their production (as it happens, H100 with its 98 MTr/mm² must be equally or a bit less dense than 9000S; A100, a perfectly adequate 7nm downgrade option, is at 65 MTr/mm² so we can be sure they'll be capable of making those, eg resurrecting Biren BR100 GPUs or things like Ascend 910). Citing Patel again, «Just like Apple is the guinea pig for TSMC process nodes and helps them ramp and achieve high yield, Huawei will likewise help SMIC in the same way […] In two years, SMIC will likely be able to produce large monolithic dies for AI and networking applications.» (In an aside, Patel laments the relative lack of gusto in strangling Chinese radio/sensor capabilities, which are more formidable and immediately scary than all that compute. However, this makes sense if we look at the ongoing chip trade war through the historical lens, with the reasonable objective being Chinese obsolescence a la what happened to the Soviet Union and its microelectronics, and arguably even Japan in the 80s, which is why ASML/Samsung/TSMC are on the map at all; Choyna military threat per se, except to Taiwan, being a distant second thought, if not a total pretext. This r/LessCredibleDefense discussion may be of interest).
So. I have also pooh-poohed the Chinese result back then, assuming that tiny crypto ASICs are as good as they will get within the bounds assigned to them, «swan song of Chinese industry», and won't achieve meaningful yields. Just as gwern de facto did in October 2022, predicting the slow death of Chinese industry in view of «Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items to the PRC» (even mentioning the yellow bear meme). Just as I did again 4 months ago, saying to @RandomRanger «China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something». I maintain that it's plausible they won't have a fully indigenized supply chain for any 7nm process until 2030 (and/or will likewise fail with securing chains for necessary components other than processors: HBM, interposers etc), they may well fall below the capacity they have right now (reminder that not only do scanners break down and need consumables, but they can be remotely disabled), especially if restrictions keep ramping up and they'll keep making stupid errors, e.g. actually starting and failing an attempt at annexing Taiwan, or going for Cultural Revolution Round II: Zero Covid Boogaloo, or provoking an insurgency by force-feeding all primary school students gutter oil breakfasts… with absolute power, the possibilities are endless! My dissmissal was informed not by prejudice but years upon years of promises by Chinese industry and academia representatives to get to 7nm in 2 more weeks, and consistent failure and high-profile fraud (and in fact I found persuasive this dude's argument that by some non-absurd measures the gap has widened since the Mao's era; and there was all the graphene/quantum computing "leapfrogging" nonsense, and so on). Their actors haven't become appreciably better now.
But I won't pooh-pooh any more, because their chips have become better. I also have said: «AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production». This is still technically true but apparently not in a decisive way. History is still likely to repeat – that is, like the Qing China during the Industrial Revolution, like the Soviet Union in the transistor era, the nation playing catch-up will once again run into trade restrictions, fail at the domestic fundamental innovation and miss out on the new technological stage; but it is not set in stone. Hell, they may even get to EUV through that asinine 160m synchrotron-based electron beam thing – I mean, they are trying, though it still looks like ever more academic grift… but…
I have underestimated China and overestimated the West. Mea culpa. Alphanumericsprawl and others were making good points.
Where does this leave us?
It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence. They'll have enough suitable chips, they have passable software, enough talent for 1-3 frontier companies, reams of data and their characteristically awkward ruthlessness applied to refining it (and as we've learned recently, high-quality data can compensate for a great disparity in compute). They are already running a few serious almost-OpenAI-level projects – Baidu's ERNIE, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (maybe I've mentioned it already, but their Qwen-7B/VL are really good; seems like all groups in the race were obligated to release a small model for testing purposes), maybe also Tsinghua's ChatGLM, SenseTime etc.'s InternLM and smaller ones. They – well, those groups, not the red boomer Xi – are well aware of their weaknesses and optimize around them (and borrowing from the open academic culture helps, as can be often seen in the training methods section – thanks to MIT&Meta, Microsoft, Princeton et al). They are preparing for the era of machine labor, which for now is sold as means to take care of the aging population and so on (I particularly like the Fourier Intelligence's trajectory, a near-perfect inversion of Iron Man's plot – start with the medical exoskeleton, proceed to make a full humanoid; but there are other humanoids developed in parallel, eg Unitree H1, and they seem competitive with their American equivalents like Tesla Optimus, X1 Neo and so on); in general, they are not being maximally stupid with their chances.
And this, in turn, means that the culture of the next years will be – as I've predicted in Viewpoint Focus 3 years ago – likely dominated by the standoff, leading up to much more bitter economic decoupling and kinetic war; promoting bipartisan jingoism and leaving less space for «culture war» as understood here; on the upside, it'll diminish the salience of progressive campaigns that demoralize the more traditionally minded population.
It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.
That's about all from me, thoughts?
Happy birthday to us! Hard to believe we've been the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum for two whole years. @ZorbaTHut, what a remarkable framework you've constructed; everyone else, what remarkable things you've constructed on that framework. Thanks for hanging out with us and getting into very kind, respectful, politely-worded fistfights about anything and everything under the sun.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
(Proverbs 27:17)
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 5, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 12, 2024
Contributions for the week of August 19, 2024
- Several nominated posts on the intertwining of activist politics and medical practice
Contributions for the week of August 26, 2024
As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.
Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?
…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”
Alarmed by this extremist messaging, «the media» proceeds to… harness the power of an institution associated with the Department of Justice to deanonymize him, with the explicit aim to steer the cultural evolution around the topic:
Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.
That's not bad because Journalists, as observed by @TracingWoodgrains, are inherently Good:
(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)
(That's one creative approach to encouraging gender transition, I guess).
Now to be fair, this is almost certainly parallel construction narrative – many people in the SV knew Beff's real persona, and as of late he's been very loose with opsec, funding a party, selling merch and so on. Also, the forced reveal will probably help him a great deal – it's harder to dismiss the guy as some LARPing shitposter or a corporate shill pandering to VCs (or as @Tomato said, running «an incredibly boring b2b productivity software startup») when you know he's, well, this. And this too.
Forbes article itself doesn't go very hard on Beff, presenting him as a somewhat pretentious supply-side YIMBY, an ally to Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan and such; which is more true of Beff's followers than the man himself. The more potentially damaging (to his ability to draw investment) parts are casually invoking the spirit of Nick Land and his spooky brand of accelerationism (not unwarranted – «e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates» Beff says in his manifesto), and citing some professors of «communications» and «critical theory» who are just not very impressed with the whole technocapital thing. At the same time, it reminds the reader of EA's greatest moment (no not the bed nets).
Online, Beff confirms being Verdon:
I started this account as a means to spread hope, optimism, and a will to build the future, and as an outlet to share my thoughts despite to the secretive nature of my work… Around the same time as founding e/acc, I founded @Extropic_AI. A deep tech startup where we are building the ultimate substrate for Generative AI in the physical world by harnessing thermodynamic physics. Ideas simmering while inventing a this paradigm of computing definitely influenced the initial e/acc writings. I very much look forward to sharing more about our vision for the technology we are building soon. In terms of my background, as you've now learned, my main identity is @GillVerd. I used to work on special projects at the intersection of physics and AI at Alphabet, X and Google. Before this, I was a theoretical physicist working on information theory and black hole physics. Currently working on our AI Manhattan project to bring fundamentally new computing to the world with an amazing team of physics and AI geniuses, including my former TensorFlow Quantum co-founder @trevormccrt1 as CTO. Grateful every day to get to build this technology I have been dreaming of for over 8 years now with an amazing team.
And Verdon confirms the belief in Beffian doctrine:
Civilization desperately needs novel cultural and computing paradigms for us to achieve grander scope & scale and a prosperous future. I strongly believe thermodynamic physics and AI hold many of the answers we seek. As such, 18 months ago, I set out to build such cultural and computational paradigms.
I am fairly pessimistic about Extropic for reasons that should be obvious enough to people who've been monitoring the situation with DL compute startups and bottlenecks, so it may be that Beff's cultural engineering will make a greater impact than Verdon's physical one. Ironic, for one so contemptuous of wordcels.
Maturation of e/acc from a meme to a real force, if it happens (and as feared on Alignment Forum, in the wake of OpenAI coup-countercoup debacle), will be part of a larger trend, where the quasi-Masonic NGO networks of AI safetyists embed themselves in legacy institutions to procure the power of law and privileged platforms, while the broader organic culture and industry develops increasingly potent contrarian antibodies to their centralizing drive. Shortly before the doxx, two other clusters in the AI debate have been announced.
First one I'd mention is d/acc, courtesy of Vitalik Buterin; it's the closest to acceptable compromise that I've seen. It does not have many adherents yet but I expect it to become formidable because Vitalik is.
Across the board, I see far too many plans to save the world that involve giving a small group of people extreme and opaque power and hoping that they use it wisely. And so I find myself drawn to a different philosophy, one that has detailed ideas for how to deal with risks, but which seeks to create and maintain a more democratic world and tries to avoid centralization as the go-to solution to our problems. This philosophy also goes quite a bit broader than AI, and I would argue that it applies well even in worlds where AI risk concerns turn out to be largely unfounded. I will refer to this philosophy by the name of d/acc.
The "d" here can stand for many things; particularly, defense, decentralization, democracy and differential. First, think of it about defense, and then we can see how this ties into the other interpretations.
[…] The default path forward suggested by many of those who worry about AI essentially leads to a minimal AI world government. Near-term versions of this include a proposal for a "multinational AGI consortium" ("MAGIC"). Such a consortium, if it gets established and succeeds at its goals of creating superintelligent AI, would have a natural path to becoming a de-facto minimal world government. Longer-term, there are ideas like the "pivotal act" theory: we create an AI that performs a single one-time act which rearranges the world into a game where from that point forward humans are still in charge, but where the game board is somehow more defense-favoring and more fit for human flourishing.
The main practical issue that I see with this so far is that people don't seem to actually trust any specific governance mechanism with the power to build such a thing. This fact becomes stark when you look at the results to my recent Twitter polls, asking if people would prefer to see AI monopolized by a single entity with a decade head-start, or AI delayed by a decade for everyone… The size of each poll is small, but the polls make up for it in the uniformity of their result across a wide diversity of sources and options. In nine out of nine cases, the majority of people would rather see highly advanced AI delayed by a decade outright than be monopolized by a single group, whether it's a corporation, government or multinational body. In seven out of nine cases, delay won by at least two to one. This seems like an important fact to understand for anyone pursuing AI regulation.
[…] my experience trying to ensure "polytheism" within the Ethereum ecosystem does make me worry that this is an inherently unstable equilibrium. In Ethereum, we have intentionally tried to ensure decentralization of many parts of the stack: ensuring that there's no single codebase that controls more than half of the proof of stake network, trying to counteract the dominance of large staking pools, improving geographic decentralization, and so on. Essentially, Ethereum is actually attempting to execute on the old libertarian dream of a market-based society that uses social pressure, rather than government, as the antitrust regulator. To some extent, this has worked: the Prysm client's dominance has dropped from above 70% to under 45%. But this is not some automatic market process: it's the result of human intention and coordinated action.
[…] if we want to extrapolate this idea of human-AI cooperation further, we get to more radical conclusions**. Unless we create a world government powerful enough to detect and stop every small group of people hacking on individual GPUs with laptops, someone is going to create a superintelligent AI eventually - one that can think a thousand times faster than we can - and no combination of humans using tools with their hands is going to be able to hold its own against that. And so we need to take this idea of human-computer cooperation much deeper and further. A first natural step is brain-computer interfaces.…
etc. I mostly agree with his points. By focusing on the denial of winner-takes-all dynamics, it becomes a natural big tent proposal and it's already having effect on the similarly big tent doomer coalition, pulling anxious transhumanists away from the less efficacious luddites and discredited AI deniers.
The second one is «AI optimism» represented chiefly by Nora Belrose from Eleuther and Qiuntin Pope (whose essays contra Yud 1 and contra appeal to evolution as an intuition pump 2 I've been citing and signal-boosting for next to a year now; he's pretty good on Twitter too). Belrose is in agreement with d/acc; and in principle, I think this one is not so much a faction or a movement as the endgame to the long arc of AI doomerism initiated by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the ultimate progenitor of this community, born of the crisis of faith in Yud's and Bostrom's first-principles conjectures and entire «rationality» in light of empirical evidence. Many have tried to attack the AI doom doctrine from the outside (eg George Hotz), but only those willing to engage in the exegesis of Lesswrongian scriptures can sway educated doomers. Other actors in, or close to this group:
- Matthew Barnett with his analysis of goalpost-movement by MIRI, such as on factory-running benchmark and value misspecification thesis, and strengths of optimistic paradigms like Drexler's CAIS model.
- Alex Turner, who had written, arguably, two strongest and most popular formal proofs of instrumental convergence to power-seeking in AI agents 1 2, but has since fallen from grace, regrets his work and thinks deceptive alignment with LLMs is pretty much impossible.
- 1a3orn who is mainly concerned about centralization of power and opportunistic exploitation of AI risk narratives (also recommended: on Hansonian position in the FOOM debate).
- Beren Millidge the former head of research at Conjecture, Connor Leahy's extreme doomer company which has pivoted fully to advocacy and is gaining pull among British elites; over the last 1-2 years he has concluded that almost all of the MIRI-style assumptions 1 2 and their policy implications are confused.
- John David Pressman who's just a good thinker and AI researcher at Stability.
- Various other renegades and doubters like Kaj Sotala dunking on the evolution appeal, Zach M. Davis debating Yud-like «Doomimir», Nostalgebraist, arguably many scientists with P(doom)≤25% (and if you press them, ≈0% for their own AGI research program) like Rohin Shah. To an extent, even Paul Christiano (although he is in favor of decelerating; there are speculations that it's mostly due to being married to EA).
Optimists claim:
The last decade has shown that AI is much easier to control than many had feared. Today’s brain-inspired neural networks inherit human common sense, and their behavior can be molded to our preferences with simple, powerful algorithms. It’s no longer a question of how to control AI at all, but rather who will control it.
As optimists, we believe that AI is a tool for human empowerment, and that most people are fundamentally good. We strive for a future in which AI is distributed broadly and equitably, where each person is empowered by AIs working for them, under their own control. To this end, we support the open-source AI community, and we oppose attempts to centralize AI research in the hands of a small number of corporations in the name of “safety.” Centralization is likely to increase economic inequality and harm civil liberties, while doing little to prevent determined wrongdoers. By developing AI in the open, we’ll be able to better understand the ways in which AI can be misused and develop effective defense mechanisms.
So in terms of a political compass:
- AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
- plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
- vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
- and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)
(Not covered: Schmidhuber, Sutton& probably Carmack as radically «misaligned» AGI successor species builders, Suleyman the statist, LeCun the Panglossian, Bengio&Hinton the naive socialists, Hassabis the vague, Legg the prophet, Tegmark the hysterical, Marcus the pooh-pooher and many others).
This compass will be more important than the default one as time goes on. Where are you on it?
As an aside: I recommend two open LLMs above all others. One is OpenHermes 2.5-7B, the other is DeepSeek-67B (33b-coder is OK too). Try them. It's not OpenAI, but it's getting closer and you don't need to depend on Altman's or Larry Summers' good graces to use them. With a laptop, you can have AI – at times approaching human level – anywhere. This is irreversible.
It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
As the academic system is slowly imploding, my career followed suit and I recently found myself licking my wounds in a cushy industry job (read: adult daycare) and dreaming of startups. This was one of my brainstorms, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out a way that it could ever be profitable, so I’m releasing it into the wild.
You’ve probably heard of the hygiene hypothesis; in a nutshell, our immune systems ‘evolved’ to deal with lives that were, immunologically speaking, nasty, brutish and short. Consequently, the dial on the thermostat got turned up a bit too high for our fully [immunologically] automated gay space communism with pesky luxuries like vaccines, soap and plumbing. The incidences of immune conditions like asthma, allergies, MS, Crohn’s, T1D have gone up three to four fold in the last 70 odd years in developed nations which is too rapid for dysgenics as an explanation. Some interesting pieces of evidence hinting at a deeper truth;
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Adult immigrants from developing nations to the first world are by and large unaffected, but their children do have increases. This suggests an environmental rather than genetic etiology, and furthermore, that the environmental influences have to happen while the immune system is developing (though the evidence for this latter point is not particularly strong in my opinion). 1 2 3 4 5
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Abiotic mice (no bacteria or fungi in their gut, skin, esophagus, etc) have very defective immune systems. Whole compartments of the immune system fail to develop properly, suggesting that interplay between pathogens, benign commensals and the immune system is required.
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A number of studies have shown that even within developed nations, individuals raised on farms or exposed to animals at very young ages have lower incidences of atopy and autoimmunity.
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Your immune system develops in ‘waves’ and is ‘educated’ throughout your development (and almost certainly beyond!). Furthermore, there is substantial variation in our immune systems due to infectious history/environment. (Note that some competing papers took similar approaches with significantly different conclusions). These all point towards significant environmental influences* on these complex immunological diseases.
You’ve probably also heard of Alex Jones claiming that the US government is turning the frogs gay. With this audience, you probably also know that, uh, ‘turning the frogs gay’ isn’t a very honest description, but it is a real problem. Indeed, the process for dumping a new chemical into the environment is labyrinthine, but it probably isn’t particularly effective at screening substances that might influence the immune system. They seem largely focused on chemicals that mimic hormones (see: declining sperm counts and the aforementioned gay frogs).
The crux of this post: Why isn’t more effort expended towards identifying environmental factors, preferably added in the last 70 odd years in the developed world, that modify the immune system?
The hypothesis: Increased exposure to certain chemicals in our environment (food, makeup, air pollution, water contamination), when intersecting with susceptible genotypes, has led to an increase in allergy and autoimmune disease in the developed world.
So, to test it, you’d want to screen large numbers of chemicals in some kind of high-throughput immune assays. Good news: The dataset exists, and you can download it yourself! Bad news: It’s crap! Half-good-half-bad news: Nobody (as far as I know) talks about it or uses it for anything.
About 10 years ago the EPA decided to modernize environmental toxicology and generate The Dataset to end all datasets. They spent (wasted?) tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars building the data architecture, contracting an army of adult daycare inmates like myself to carry out the assays all to generate a half-dozen low-impact publications nobody has ever read (don’t trust their publications page, it’s padded with anyone who uses the data for any purpose) and this monstrous dataset. Here’s a 728 page pdf some poor soul generated to describe the in vitro assays.
I fiddled around with the data about a year ago at this point, and generated this list of compounds if anyone is interested. I mostly focused on assays relevant to T cells (due to personal biases - B cells are Boring, T cells are Terrific) that came up with a Ka < 10uM, although keep in mind that the majority of these things will be false positives*. Tldr; pesticides are really, really bad and you shouldn’t eat them; they light up every assay like a roman candle. Triclosan was an interesting hit as it’s been (weakly) shown to influence autoimmunity in some mouse models as well as an association with allergy development. Here it came up as a potentiator of lck activity, which is one of the major stimulatory proteins in T cells.
So…who cares? I suppose one might imagine mining some of these molecules as precursors to new drugs after the medicinal chemists have their way with them, although that kind of ‘pharma 1.0’ thinking never really appealed to me. Then again, everyone tells me to just try to make something work, and then your second company can be your vanity project/moonshot. Alternatively, I’ve got to assume that such a large database is amenable to machine learning, maybe along the lines of this paper? I think the largest problem is that the majority of the data here is without a doubt crap. Less relevant to the startup perspective is what the EPA actually wants to do, which is regulate some of these compounds. This would probably be prosocial, but then, if you wanted me to do prosocial stuff you should have given me my academic lab, ja?
*Note that, as complex traits, there are obviously genetic influences on the development of atopy and autoimmunity. The intersection of susceptible genetics and environment leads to disease.
**Cons: - Tons of false positives as many of these compounds won’t be bioavailable or aren’t present in quantities large enough to be relevant
Dataset sucks and others have claimed it to be unreliable
Unclear that people suddenly started being exposed to these things in the last 70 years
Assays poorly optimized and either cell-free (very prone to false positives) or done artificial overexpression systems
I made this list not out of snark or spite, but because it has rained all day, rained, even, on me as I took my walk, which I cut short, and because I have been making notes for months, and now seemed as good a time as any.
I had a long intro for this, hearkening back to grad school and people using terms they thought others knew and probably others did know but maybe not, and argots, and random musings, but I'll spare you.
These are words or terms I've seen in my many months here that I didn't know, or did know but didn't put together with their meaning. I am linking specific posts to where they were used, though these I found by doing a hard-search and are not necessarily the posts where I first saw the word/term. Any mistakes or misrepresentations are my fault. I hope this is helpful to others among us who are sometimes as confused as I am. Probably many of you know all these and must imagine me very old to post this. So be it.
If you recognize yourself as the author, I am not intending to be snide, or criticize your post. You just got lucky.
Edit: Many of these are probably going to need to be updated and tweaked. Feel free to add comments.
Let's start with the biggie:
asabiyyah: a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion.
Bagdhad Bob: When war propaganda becomes so out of touch with reality it turns comedic and achieves the opposite of the desired effect. It is said such propaganda is "Baghdad Bobbed" exactly at the moment when this threshold is crossed. From Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, Iraqi War Information Minister in 2003.
Baumol’s Cost Disease: From the late William Baumol, NYU’s Stern School of Business. used to explain why prices for the services offered by people-dependent professions with low productivity growth—such as (arguably) education, health care, and the arts—keep going up, even though the amount of goods and services each worker in those industries generates hasn’t necessarily done the same.
"This is Baumol's cost disease in a nutshell."
Note: @jeroboam helpfully linked a Wiki page in this instance.
Chesterton’s fence: rule of thumb that suggests that you should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or do away with a tradition until you understand why it's there in the first place
Color Tribes e.g. Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, Gray Tribe, etc. (suggested by @madeofmeat): See this SSC post.. Basically and without nuance: Red Tribe: culturally conservative, often rural or religious, associated with traditional American values (akin to Republicans). Blue Tribe: culturally liberal, urban, secular, progressive on social issues (akin to Democrats). Gray Tribe: technocratic, rationalist, or contrarian; values intellectual independence and often critiques both Red and Blue tribes. These tribes reflect cultural alignment and not necessarily strict political ideology. Thus identity and worldview over party affiliation.
"Scotch is also the blue-coded whisky; Bourbon and Rye are the red tribe hard liquors of choice."
Conflict Theory and Mistake Theory: (courtesy @gattsuru) where Conflict Theory is the model that disagreements reflect two sides naturally opposed to each other who at best are negotiating over the division of spoils, while Mistake Theory is the model that each side disagrees about a question and could be persuaded. See example here or here. Quokka is largely a criticism of or self-identifier for mistake theorists and... I think we're at the point where there's not enough pure mistake theorists to have anything similar going the other way for conflict theorists.
consent à outrance: From the French. Suggests an agreement or consent that is given fully and without reservation, sometimes to the point of being excessive or without consideration of the consequences.
CRT: Critical Race Theory.
DRM: (I saw it used as a verb but have no link because I can no longer find it). Digital Righs Management. Presumably restricting the ways in which content (music, whatever) can be used, copied, or distributed.
Dunbar-limited world: Reference to Robin Dunbar, biological anthropologist. The “Dunbar Number” is the upper limit on the number of social relationships a human can effectively manage. (I believe it is supposed to be 150.)
Einsatzgruppen: : From the German. Actually, a German word. These were “mobile killing units,” best known for their role in the murder of Jews in mass shooting operations during the Holocaust.
Euthyphro: : A “straight-thinker.” A combination of εὐθύς (euthys), which means straight or direct and φρονέω (phroneô) which means to think or to reason.
NB: Alternate definition by @MachineElfPaladin here.
Failson/Faildaughter (suggested by @Crowstep and @2rafa, with various disagreement that faildaughters exist. Enjoy that argument here.): A term used to describe the adult offspring of wealthy or influential parents who are seen as lazy, incompetent, or underachieving—coasting on family privilege without earning success through merit. The term is often used sarcastically or critically, especially in discussions of nepotism, elite mediocrity, or generational underperformance.
Frasurbane: portmanteau of the sitcom Frasier and urbane, is the wonderfully specific aesthetic of late '90s interiors of people who want to come across as sophisticated and worldly.
HBD: If you do not know what this means, that’s weird, because it is almost a theme here. Human Biodiversity. Some here swear by its truth, others do not swear by it but expect it’s real, others think it’s dubious. Too many instances to choose from. Edit: A definition courtesy of @madeofmeat: "The belief that genetics cause significant individual differences in socially significant mental traits of people, such as temperament and intelligence, and these differences may be difficult or impossible to change with environmental interventions. For example, people might have an innate level of intelligence that cannot be meaningfully raised and that isn't high enough for effectively learning complex and high-status jobs for many people. Opposed to a belief held implicitly in much of mid-to-late 20th century sociology and cultural anthropology that differences in such features are culturally determined and can be fully remedied with environmental interventions like extending compulsory education and policing racist microaggressions. The thing Steven Pinker writes about in his book The Blank Slate and Charles Murray in Human Diversity." A proponent of this perspective, in particularly a vociferous proponent, might be termed an HBDer.
and
lolcow : A person whose eccentric or foolish behaviour can be exploited to amuse onlookers.
idpol: abbreviation based on identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, etc.
If-by-whiskey: If-by-whiskey is a type of argument that supports both sides of a topic by employing terminology that is selectively emotionally sensitive. Originates from a speech given by Mississippi state representative Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr. in 1952.
Kolmogorov Complicity: Originated with Scott Alexander from his blog. Reference to the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. The idea of navigating or conforming to oppressive orthodoxies while still trying to contribute to the growth of knowledge and truth discreetly. In the more erudite words of @FeepingCreature: "Should be noted that Kolmogorov complicity is a wordplay off Kolmogorov complexity, a computer-science concept that is an important part of the Sequences for its role in Eliezer's minimalist construction of empiricism."
libfem: Stands for liberal feminist, also known as intersectional feminism or third wave feminism. A societal ideology focused on power dynamics and microlabels. a main branch of feminism defined by its focus on achieving gender equality through political and legal reform within the framework of liberal democracy and informed by a human rights perspective.
“The far end of libfem, maybe.”
MGTOW: an acronym for Men Going Their Own Way, an online social movement and backlash to feminism where men renounce interactions with women and seek to define and live out their masculinity on their own terms.
Motte & bailey (at the suggestion of @FtttG) This is when someone defends a controversial or hard-to-defend idea (the “bailey”) but retreats to a safer, more reasonable position (the “motte”) when challenged—then acts as if that safer position was their claim all along. As far as I can tell the use of this term got widespread use online (and led to the this forum name) from Scott Alexander's post in 2014. It was coined to mean a fallacy posited on the original use in the context of a medieval castle (again, as far as I know) by Nicholas Schackel in this essay titled The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology. <- PDF warning.
NPC (suggested by @FtttG): From gaming, where there are Non-Player Characters who are not controlled by gamers but interact in the gaming world, often predictably. A derogatory term used to describe someone who is perceived as lacking independent thought, simply repeating popular opinions or social narratives like a video game character following a script.
Orbanization: : (maybe) the process of adopting political strategies and governance methods that are similar to those of Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary. Orbán's tenure has been characterized by a centralization of power, control over media, erosion of checks and balances within government structures, and a move towards what is sometimes called "illiberal democracy."
Overton window: an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. It says politicians can act only within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window.
“Transgender politics wasn’t in the Overton window at this point.”
Pascal’s Wager: the argument that it is in one's rational self-interest to act as if God exists, since the infinite punishments of hell, provided they have a positive probability, however small, outweigh any countervailing advantage.
"Pascal's wager is terrible because infinite rewards break game theory."
Pill colors: Red, Blue, Black
- Red Pill: In the context of online communities, particularly those focused on gender and relationships, "Red Pill" refers to the belief that men have been socially disadvantaged and that conventional beliefs about gender, attraction, and social interaction are misleading or false. It often involves the idea that men need to become aware of and confront these supposed harsh realities to improve their own lives. The term is frequently used in men's rights and certain dating advice communities.
- lue Pill: The "Blue Pill" is often posited as the opposite of the "Red Pill." It represents adherence to conventional or mainstream beliefs about gender, relationships, and society. In communities that use these terms, taking the "Blue Pill" means accepting societal norms and beliefs without questioning them, often portrayed as living in blissful ignorance.
- lack Pill: The "Black Pill" takes a more fatalistic and often nihilistic viewpoint compared to the Red Pill. It's associated with a belief that certain unchangeable traits (like physical appearance, height, etc.) predominantly determine one's success in areas like dating and social interaction. Black Pill ideology is often linked with extreme pessimism, defeatism, and a belief that systemic changes or personal improvements are largely futile.
PMC : Professional/Managerial Class
Postrat or post-rationalist: (courtesy @gattsuru) Someone that rejects the rationalist movement's interest in what is true as impossible, and instead prioritizes what is useful to believe. Usually part of the (twitter) rationalist diaspora. See example here.
purity spiral: a sociological theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished
quant: short for quantitative analyst. Edit: A correction on this from @MadMonzer: "Quant refers to anyone working in a job in finance which requires Masters or PhD-level maths skills on a regular basis."
A hard search for this term provided too many instances of other words using these five letters, e.g. quantify, etc. and I didn’t have the patience to keep looking. But I’ve seen this term used and you will, too, if you keep reading this forum.
quokka: I have no idea what this means except a small marsupial. Help. Thank you @naraburns. The origin is here. From what I can gather a quokka is a kind of gentle-dispositioned person, innocent of nature, who is a bit of a nerd and wants to discuss things in good faith. Often applicable to certain autists. It is not a pejorative term. Edit: Maybe it is.
"Can you imagine a bunch of quokkas going about EA and Skynet every two days on the forum?"
Rationalist: (courtesy @gattsuru) an adherent (or some style of critic) of the philosophy established on LessWrong, originally focused on trying to develop a more accurate model of what is true through understanding available information and avoiding the various pitfalls newly being recognized by 1990s-2005-era social psychology. Not... very typically that rational, and very much not philosophical rationalism.
Ratsphere, rationalist diaspora: (courtesy @gattsuru) A reader or commenter from LessWrong that started moving to other social media, typically in 2010-2014, or those adjacent to them, or adjacent to those adjacent to them. See here or here.
Russell conjugation: a rhetorical technique used to create an intrinsic bias towards or against a piece of information. Edit: per @malcontent : I X, You Y, They Z. Where X is a word choice that paints the speaker in a positive light, Y is somewhat less generous to you, and Z paints the other person in a negative light. Quoted here
Scissor statement: (suggested by @FtttG) This is a claim or idea that causes people with different values or worldviews to strongly disagree in ways that make mutual understanding worse, often leading to conflict rather than resolution. The term was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the site LessWrong, where he described hypothetical statements so divisive that people exposed to them would become irreversibly opposed, like blades of a scissor forced apart.
shape-rotator: Someone with high mathematical and technical skills, often portrayed as rivals to the wordcels (who have stronger language and verbal skills)
“I thought we were shape rotators?”
soyjak: (I still only vaguely understand this.) An online image of an emasculate man, often with an excited expression, with an art style based upon the original wojak.
"This looks more like an excuse to draw your enemies as the soyjak and yourself as the, uh, tiger." Edit: Despite repeated attempts, I cannot get this link to work.
stochastic: having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
technocrat: an adherent to technocracy, or the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts as opposed to professional politicians.
thot: From “That Ho Over There.” A woman who has (or is presumed to have, for whatever reason) many casual sexual encounters or relationships. Likewise, e-thot is a woman who makes money online from male (or predominantly male) audiences, by doing whatever for cash.
"I've seen sponsored ads (with the "ad" tag) for individual OnlyFans thots."
Third World-ism: a political concept and ideology that emerged in the late 1940s or early 1950s during the Cold War and tried to generate unity among the nations that did not want to take sides between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Noe: various users question the meaning and use of this term.
toxoplasma: (suggested by @FtttG) again, from (I believe) This is the idea that the most divisive or controversial topics—not the most important or most agreed-upon ones—tend to get the most attention and discussion online, because they provoke disagreement and engagement. This is again from a SSC post entitled The Toxoplasma of Rage where he used the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (which spreads better when its host behaves riskily) as a metaphor for how controversial ideas spread more virally, even if (or because) they cause conflict.
tradfem: a portmanteau of "traditional feminism" in reference to belief that adherence traditional feminine gender roles are better or more correct, especially those held by conservative Christian Americans, especially WASPs. Edit: Also a play on "radfem" or radical feminist. Thank you again, @naraburns.
“The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis.”
Tpot: (courtesy @gattsuru) usually lower-cased. 'That part of twitter', a mostly coastal techie group, some overlap with ratsphere. Largely an endonym.
"For better or for worse he's basically a typical TPOT/Vibecamp-sphere guy."
Varg: I still don’t know what this means. I found various meanings of varg but none are satisfactory. Help.
Von Neumann: synonymous with “really big-brained person” as far as I can tell. Refers to John Von Neumann, a computer guy. Notably a “Von Neumann probe” would be a spacecraft capable of replicating itself. Edit: As I said above, misrepresentations are my fault.
Westphalian: the concept of state sovereignty and the idea that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, free from external interference. From a series of treaties in 1648. We also have a member with this as part of his username.
Wignat "wigger nationalist" and was originally used to describe lower class, violent, and unattractive neo Nazis that were willing to engage in street violence and unabashed Nazism with the use of swastikas and other symbols. Edit: The term is "now used pretty broadly both here and on the ‘dissident right’ or in wider very online communities to refer to all white nationalists, not just swampland prison tattoo neonazis."
UPDATE COMING SOON!
The hardest part of telling any story is getting started. The beginning is as good a time as any.
How does a man wind up in a war? The same way he winds up in Carnegie Hall.
I lost this fight at six.
No shit, there I was. Laying in the dust of my mother's garden with ants on my dick, and Sam Meck kicking me in the ribs.
I'd been climbing high up in a tree when the other kids came home from school. They made a beeline. A couple of them found long sticks and poked me until I fell. Eighteen years later, a doctor in Baghdad would tell me my left arm had been broken that day. But since an X-ray would have made Jesus sad, all I knew then was I had a useless arm, and a lot of pain. Didn't make it past the garden before they caught me.
Most of the boys hadn't touched me yet. Sam and his little henchman Guerrito were the instigators, the leaders. They'd gotten the sticks. The rest of them just fanned out and seemed happy to spectate. The pom squad of trash society, drifting along within the group opinion, cheering for the good guys, cheering against the bad guys, so certain they know which is which. I hated them most of all. How pathetic and vile, to be cruel and also cowardly. Sam was a different, more immediate problem.
I was a weird kid with a weird family. We were in a faith healing cult, warned against interacting too much with “the world”. We'd always be a target and as the oldest I was going to be the first to deal with it. Already the neighbor kids had begun tormenting me and my retarded younger brother. And what was my skinny ass gonna do? I was a theology nerd; sensitive, intellectual, thin and uncoordinated. Sam was still kicking me. I needed a plan.
My options were limited. Parents were strict pacifists. Foxe's Book of Martyrs was very much required reading. Involvement in any conflict would result in punishment. There were no justifications for violence, so the only thing I was allowed to do was take the beating. And then turn the other cheek or some shit. God's will was for Sam to keep kicking, and for me to forgive him when he got done.
Weird to notice. The ants were crawling on me immediately when I fell. Must have landed right on the mound, shorts were a bad idea. Tick- tock motherfucker, this is the logic of violence. You get to figure it out in pain, with limited time before your ability to resist is gone. My arm really hurt.
Short answer, I'm screwed. Nothing I could have done would stop the beating. But long term, what's the play? Already thinking about tomorrow. Got to have a plan.
I could hide, but can't do that forever. We live next door.
I could stay inside with three infant siblings and an increasingly insane mother. Not a great option.
We'd played baseball a few months before and Sam got hit in the face with the ball and he bled everywhere and started screaming like a bitch. Mom said to play careful with him because he was a hemo-something..... a kick landed on my bad arm. There was blood and dirt in my mouth, snot and tears streaming in thick ropes.
The reality was that people are mostly cowards. The four boys ranged around watching a kid beat another kid. I remember neither their faces nor their names. They hound after the misfit, the outcast, the different, but only when it costs them little. All I had to do was raise the price and maybe they would drop out. It wouldn't stop the beating now, and it would mean getting punished by my parents later. But they'd know that picking on me wasn't free. The next time, maybe there would only be four. I was an optimist then.
I rolled into Sam's post foot the next kick, curling my bruised stomach into his sneaker as it struck, capturing his legs together at the ankles. Shrieking, I pulled him down. He fell badly. I threw a leg over, sat tall on his chest and hit him with a big rock I'd been laying on for the last thirty seconds. Then again. With each swing, his face opened wide, white skin over red flesh over white bone. Blood was flying everywhere, spattering my arms, shirt and the bean plants. My own bloody, muddy mucus hanging from my chin in long strings, dripped onto the little green alligator on Sam's shirt. Strange the things you focus on at times like this.
Guerrito piled into me, followed by all the other boys. Small fists rained down as I tried to cover my injured arm and rolled to the fetal position. I was giggling and sobbing and dry heaving and spitting dirt. Crazed, wounded. Sam was crying and saying he had to go home. The boys were pushing off of me, and then.... The sun was warm, the roto-tilled earth soft, the ants still mobile, tickling. I lay there a long time, trying to get hold of myself. It was time to pay the bill.
A long walk fifty yards or so to the house. Mom cleaned me up, told me to stop crying like a baby and wrapped my arm in an Ace bandage. Then she paddled my ass with a wooden spatula and sent me to my room to wait for dad to get home, when I'd get the proper whuppin.
I wasn't scared of a belt any more. It wasn't going to hurt more than what had already happened. The dread that a kid normally has when they must wait for a punishment was gone. Only rage, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal remained. I'd been sent out into the world with “turn the other cheek” as my only tool. That would never happen again. A promise, and with it, strange elation.
I could see Sam's face when I had come off the ground. His eyes were dumb and confused at first. When I hit him the second time, he was scared, frantic. In that instant, the tables turned, briefly and forever. That feeling stayed with me the rest of my life. It's the tiny black radioactive core that powers me, warms me, resolves me. This was what I was born for, this was what I was meant to do. No theological argument or academic interest would ever hold a candle to that sort of pain and power.
In time, this decision would cost me and a great many people a great many things. But I was six at the time, and learning my first life lesson. No matter the odds, the outcome, the rules, the commandments from on high, I could make the world bleed.
No gods, no masters.
Just us and these rocks, sunshine.
[The full post is ~5300 words and way way too long for the Motte's 20k character limit but I'm posting as much as I can fit.]
If you've ever been curious about the etymology of cis and trans as prefixes, just know they're Latin for "the same side of" and "the other side of", respectively. These prefixes are widely used in organic chemistry to distinguish between molecules that have the exact same atoms with a different spatial arrangement. Notice, for example, how in the cis isomer below on the left, chlorine atoms are oriented toward the "same side" as each other, but on the "other side" of each other in the trans isomer.
[chlorine on hydrogen action too hot for the motte]
The dashed line is just me simplifying the geometric comparison plane (the E-Z convention is much more precise in this respect), but regardless, this is meant only to illustrate how talk of cis or trans is necessarily one of *relative positioning. *A single solitary point floating in space cannot be described as the same or other "side" of anything when there is nothing else to contrast it against.
Now this is just organic chemistry, not real life, but the cis/trans convention is applied consistently elsewhere. In the context relevant to this post, "sex" and "gender" are the two anchor points --- the two chlorine atoms in the dichloroethene molecule of life --- and their relative resonance/dissonance relative to each other is the very definition of cis/trans gender identity. To avoid any ambiguity, I use sex to refer to one's biological role in reproduction (strictly binary), while gender is the fuzzy spectrum of sex-based societal expectations about how one is supposed to act. If your sex and gender identity "align", then you are considered cis; if they don't, then you are trans. Same side versus other side.
But what does it mean for sex and gender identity to "align"? There is an obvious answer to this question, but it is peculiarly difficult to encounter it transparently out in the wild. For reasons outlined below, I will argue that the elusiveness is completely intentional.
More than two years ago I wrote a post that got me put on a watch list, called Do Trans People Exist?. The question mark was barely a hedge and the theory I outlined remains straightforward:
I'm starting to think that trans people do not exist. What I mean by this is that I'm finding myself drawn towards an alternative theory that when someone identifies as trans, they've fallen prey to a gender conformity system that is too rigid.
Two years on and I maintain my assertion remains trivially true. One change I would make is avoiding the "fallen prey" language because I have no idea whether the rigidity is nascent to and incubated by the trans community (for whatever reasons), or if it's just an enduring consequence of society's extant gender conformity system (no matter how much liberal society tells itself otherwise). If you disagree with my assertion, it's actually super-duper easy to refute it; all anyone needs to do is offer up a coherent description of either cis or trans gender identity void of any reference to gender stereotypes. But I'd be asking for the impossible here, because the essence of these concepts is to describe the resonance or dissonance that exists between one's biological reality (sex) and the accordant societal expectations imposed (gender). Unless you internalize or assimilate society's gender expectations, unless you accede to them and capitulate that they're worth respecting and paying attention to as a guiding lodestar, concepts like "gender dysphoria" are fundamentally moot. A single point cannot resonate or clash with itself, as these dynamics necessitate interaction between distinct elements.
The position I'm arguing is nothing new. The Oxford philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper had already established the incoherencies inherent within this framework conclusively and with impeccable clarity in this lecture she gave way back in 2016 (website form). It's wild how her arguments remain perfectly relevant today, and if anyone has attempted a refutation I have not encountered it. And yet this remains a controversial position to stake, but not because it's wrong. Rather, I believe, it's because of how insulting it is to be accused of reifying any system of stereotypes nowadays.
In case it needs to be said, stereotypes can occasionally offer useful shortcuts, but their inherent overgeneralization risks flattening reality into inaccuracy. The major risk relevant to this discussion is when stereotypes crystallize into concrete expectations, suffocating individual expression with either forced conformity due to perceived group membership, or feelings of alienation due to perceived incongruence. The indignation to my position is also understandable given how the foundational ethos of the queer liberation movement was a rejection of gender normativity's constraints.
You're not obligated to take my word for this, but I do tend to feel an immense discomfort whenever I hold a position that is purportedly controversial, and yet I'm unable to steelman any plausible refutations --- a sense of "I must be missing something, it can't be this obvious" type deal. I did try to bridge the chasm of inscrutability when I wrote What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is. My plea to everyone was to jettison the ambiguous semantic topography within this topic and replace it with concrete specifics:
To the extent that woman is a cluster of traits, I struggle to contemplate a scenario where communicating the cluster is a more efficient or more thoughtful method of communication than just communicating the specific pertinent trait. Just tell me what you want me to know directly. Use other words if need be.
Because right now it's a complete fucking riddle to me if someone discloses that they "identify as a woman" or whatever. What, exactly, am I supposed to do with this new information? Suggesting that stereotypes are the referent is met with umbrage and steadfast denials, but if not that, then what? Over the years I've tried earnestly to learn by asking questions and seeking out resources, and what I've repeatedly experienced is a marked reluctance to offer up anything more than the vaguest of details.
The ambiguity I'm referring to isn't absolute, however, and there are two notable exceptions worth briefly addressing: body modifications and preferred pronouns.
Sex does not only determine whether an individual produces large or small gametes --- an entire armory of secondary characteristics comes along for the ride, whether you like it or not. If a female happens to be distressed by their breasts and wants them removed, you could describe this scenario in two very different ways. One is that this person "identifies as a man" and their (very obviously female) breasts serve as a distressing monument that something is "off". The other way is that this person is simply distressed by their breasts, full stop, without any of the gender-related accoutrements. [These two options are not necessarily exhaustive, and I'm open to other potential interpretations.]
Is there any difference between these two approaches? The first framework adds a multitude of vexing, unanswerable questions (Does comfort with one's secondary sex characteristics require some sort of "affirmation gene" that trans people unfortunately lack? Is the problem some sort of mind/body misalignment? If so, why address one side of that equation only? Etc.) within an already overcomplicated framework. The other concern here is if the gender identity becomes prescriptive, where an individual pursues a body modification not for whatever inherent qualities it may have, but rather because of some felt obligation to "complete the set" for what their particular identity is supposed to look like.
The second framework (the one eschewing the gender identity component) would not dismiss the individual's concerns and would be part of a panoply of well-established phenomena of individuals inconsolably distressed with their body, such as body integrity dysphoria (BID), anorexia, or muscle dysphoria. The general remedies here tend to be a combination of counseling and medication to deal with the distress directly, and only in rare circumstances is permanent alteration even considered. I imagine there is some consternation that I've compared gender dysphoria with BID, but I see no reason to believe they are qualitatively different and welcome anyone to demonstrate otherwise. Regardless, I subscribe to maximum individual autonomy on these matters, and so it's not any of my business what people choose to do with their bodies. The point here is that preferences about one's body (either aesthetic or functional) exist without a reliance on paradigm shifts of one's "internal sense of self". If someone wants to, for example, bulk up and build muscle, they can just do it; it's nonsensical to say they first need to "identify" as their chosen aspiration before any changes can occur.
The other exception to the ambiguity around what gender identity* means* is pronoun preference. Chalk it up to [whatever]-privilege, but I concede I do not understand the fixation on pronouns. The closest parallel I can think of are nickname preferences, but unlike nicknames, pronouns almost never come up in two-party conversations, so it's difficult to see why they would be any more consequential. I personally accommodate pronoun preferences out of politeness (and I suspect almost everyone else does as well), the exact same way I would accommodate nicknames out of politeness. If I happen to refer to my friend using frog/frogs pronouns, it's not because I believe they're actually a frog; I'm just trying to be nice and avoid getting yelled at. Regardless of the intent behind them, pronoun preferences are a facile and woefully incomplete account for what we're warned are suicidal levels of distress around one's incongruent gender identity, so this can't be the whole story.
So on one extreme you have potentially invasive body modifications that are at least commensurate with the seriousness of the distress expressed, and on the other side you have the equivalent of a nickname preference that is relatively facile to accommodate. In between these two pillars, however, is a conspicuous vacuum of silence. My conclusion is that this missing middle is really just gendered stereotypes, but nobody wants to admit something so laughably antiquated out loud.
Well, almost nobody.
I've had this post sitting in my drafts for months largely because of an ever-present concern that I was unfairly shining a spotlight on the craziest examples from the trans-affirming community. My perennial goal with any subject is to avoid weakmanning, but with this issue I have no idea how to draw the contours and discern what arguments are representative and thus fair game to critique.
The lack of contours means I can't prove this next part conclusively, but I noticed a shift over time regarding which talking points were most common. The perennial challenge for this camp remains the logical impossibility of harmonizing the twin snakes of "trans people don't owe you passing" and "trans people will literally kill themselves if they don't pass". At least as late as 2018, there was more of an apparent comfort with leaning more toward openly reifying gendered roles and expectations. For example, in this Aeon magazine dialogue between trans philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell and gender-critical feminist Holly Lawford-Smith, Chappell uses the word script in her responses a whopping forty-one times.
But by far the most jaw-dropping example of this comfort comes from a lecture by Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, currently the head psychologist for the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals' gender clinic. When a parent asked how to know if a baby is trans, Dr. Ehrensaft literally said that a baby throwing out a barrette is a "gender signal" the baby might not really be a girl, the same way another baby opening their onesie is a signal they might be a girl. Seriously, watch this shit.
This is such a blatantly asinine thing to say that it depresses me to no end that the auditorium didn't erupt in raucous laughter at her answer. I don't even know how to respond to it. Maybe it bears repeating that babies are dumb. At any given moment, the entirety of a baby's cognitive load is already stressed over having to decide between shitting and vomiting. Dr. Ehrensaft conjures up this tale about how dumb babies are able to divinate the eternal message that "dresses are for women" out of thin air (or maybe directly from Allah), and that same dumb baby also has the ingenuity to cleverly repurpose their onesie into a jury-rigged "dress". I'm not claiming that it's impossible for young children to notice and even mirror societal expectations, including gender-related ones. Indeed, research indicates wisps of this awareness can start manifesting very early on, with children reaching "peak rigidity in their gender stereotypes at age 5 to 6" followed by a dramatic and continuing increase in flexibility. But it remains a jaw-dropping level of projection and tea leaf--reading on display here by Dr. Ehrensaft; the simple explanation that a baby might open their onesie because they're a dumb baby is apparently not worth consideration.
Dr. Ehrensaft is illustrative of the intellectual rigor that is apparently expected from the lead mental health professional in charge of the well-being of an entire clinic's worth of young patients. Matt Osborne wrote a devastating piece about her very long history of dangerous quackery. My mind was blown when I found out that Dr. Ehrensaft happened to be at the scene in 1992 desperately trying to whitewash the Daycare Satanic Panic and the unconscionable misery the "recovered memory" movement caused. In response to some highly suggestive interviews by therapists, preschool children alleged bizarre and horrific sexual abuse by staff involving drills, flying witches, underground tunnels, and hot-air balloons. The notorious McMartin case resulted in no convictions, with all charges finally dropped in 1990 after seven years of prosecutions. Two years later in an aftermath report of the similar Presidio case, Dr. Ehrensaft notes how the children's abuse narratives often contained fantasy elements, such as devilish pranks and hidden skeletons. This should normally be grounds for skepticism, but Dr. Ehrensaft stridently refuses to question the veracity of the accounts, and explains away the outlandish aspects as simply the result of trauma management --- the kids were using imaginative fears as a protective barrier for their (according to Dr. Ehrensaft) unquestionably real trauma. Given her general credulity, it's no surprise why her writing on the topic of gender identity is a murky soup of pseudo-religious nonsense about "gender ghosts" and "gender angels".
What exactly is the explanation for trans-affirming professionals like Chappell and Ehrensaft explicitly encouraging the necessity of adhering to gender scripts? Were they misled? Did they get the wrong bulletin? How? Why aren't their professional peers correcting them on such an elementary and foundational error? So many questions.
You can't keep drawing from the well of gender stereotypes so blatantly without anyone noticing. My general impression of the field is people realized how idiotic they sounded when their talking points were solidly anchored upon the veneration of (purportedly antiquated) gender roles and gender scripts. The response to this inescapable criticism has largely been to subtly pivot into the realm of empty rhetoric. But because of the necessity to cling onto strands of the initial assertions (for reasons I'll explain further), the result is a strenuous ballet of either constantly leaping between the two positions, or uncomfortably trying to straddle both.
Dr. Ehrensaft gives us an example of the vacuous. Her onesie/barrette poem of an answer above is from a video uploaded in 2018, but here's how her website explains gender nowadays, except with one particular word switched out:
This core aspect of one's identity comes from within each of us. Flibberdibber identity is an inherent aspect of a person's make-up. Individuals do not choose their flibberdibber, nor can they be made to change it. However, the words someone uses to communicate their flibberdibber identity may change over time; naming one's flibberdibber can be a complex and evolving matter. Because we are provided with limited language for flibberdibber, it may take a person quite some time to discover, or create, the language that best communicates their internal experience. Likewise, as language evolves, a person's name for their flibberdibber may also evolve. This does not mean their flibberdibber has changed, but rather that the words for it are shifting.
Can anyone reading this tell me what flibberdibber is beyond that it's something inexplicably very important?
It's probably too much to expect philosophy to throw us a lifeline here, but even with those low standards, the response from the trans-inclusionary philosophers has been a complete fucking mess and followed a similarly strenuous pivot. For example, in the 2018 paper Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender, Yale philosopher Robin Dembroff argues for a more "inclusive" understanding of gender. But in doing so, Dembroff explicitly acknowledges the glaring contradiction between decrying a category as oppressively exclusionary while simultaneously petitioning to be included within it. The apparent solution on page 44 to this conundrum is rather. . . something:
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: The Machine Politician Vs the Administrative State
Once upon a time, in the bad old days, American politics was dominated by the so-called “urban political machines.” These machines, composed of unelected, self-appointed elites, chose political candidates based on their own narrow interests and exploited uneducated and impoverished city-dwellers for their votes. By perpetuating a ruling elite based on cronyism rather than competence, they impeded good government and held back progress. Fortunately, around the turn of the twentieth century, a series of reforms broke the power of the urban bosses and ushered in a more enlightened ruling class who governed for the sake of the greater good.
That’s the popular narrative, anyway. Like many (most?) people here on the motte, I’m broadly skeptical of high modernity, progressivism, and Whig history. Accordingly, I’ve always been dubious about the knee-jerk “machine politics=bad” reaction. This skepticism has been intensified by the general failure of western efforts to transplant our own political institutions into the third world, where such clientalist arrangements are still pretty common. Clearly, they’re working for someone, or else everyone, presumably, would joyfully adopt US norms and institutions. I happened to come across a primary source from the hey-day of machine politics, “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” (available on Project Gutenberg), in which a very successful machine politician described his business in his own words. It was brief but compelling read; I’ll be describing my impressions below, mixed in with some larger thoughts about machines as a form of political organization.
Most people have probably heard of Tammany Hall. From roughly 1789 to the 1930s, the organization exercised a dominating influence in New York city politics, occasionally verging on an outright monopoly. George Washington Plunkitt was a life-long New Yorker and proud “practical politician” associated with Tammany Hall throughout his career. “Plunkitt of Tammany Hall” is largely told in his voice, with occasional notes from his editor. And it’s a compelling voice. Plunkitt may or may not have been a criminal, and he was certainly not a responsible leader by modern lights. But he is a charming and often insightful raconteur. I’m not sure I’d loan him any money, but I’d definitely buy him a beer.
Much of that charm comes down to his frankness. Plunkitt is quite honest about having gotten rich off of politics, though he denies having broken any laws. He claims to practice what he calls “honest graft”, which seems nowadays equivalent to what we could call insider trading, using his knowledge of city politics to make favorable investments. So far as I can tell, this wasn’t actually considered a crime, though it certainly rubbed some people the wrong way. Likewise, Plunkitt is extremely frank about appointing friends and associates to government jobs as a reward for their political support. He expresses shock at the suggestion you would do it any other way. Nothing seems to excite his ire more than “the curse of Civil Service reform” a topic he harangues the reader on frequently, and to which we shall return in a moment. One of the first things that struck me in the text was Plunkitt’s de-emphasis on what we moderns would normally consider a key skill of a politician, public speaking. “The men who rule have practiced keepin’ their tongues still, not exercisin’ them. So you want to drop the orator idea unless you mean to go into politics just to perform the skyrocket act.” Nation-wide media was relatively new in Plunkitt’s time, the trans-continental telegraph only having been completed in 1861. Nation-wide broadcast media was not even a twinkle in Marconi’s eye yet. Presumably, in such an environment the kind of mass popular appeal that politicians today cultivate was much less of a requirement.
There are probably some readers who will point to the general mediocrity of most political speeches today and argue that no, party-elite connections are still what matters. I won’t say these people are entirely wrong, but I don’t think they’re entirely right either. It seems very unlikely to me that, for example, Barack Obama’s popularity within the college-educated demographic was entirely unrelated to his ability to performatively model PMCi-values on a national stage. For that matter, Trump is frequently cited as someone who enjoyed considerable success in spite of a general lack of party-elite connections. I suspect the increasing importance of nationwide broadcast media was a significant contributor to the eventual decline of the machines.
Closely related to this is the role of class dynamics. Plunkitt comes across as something I didn’t realize existed, an urban populist. Speaking of a hypothetical candidate who asserts “I took first prize in college at Aristotle; I can recite all of Shakespeare forwards and backwards; there ain’t nothin’ in science that ain’t as familiar to me as blockades on the elevated roads and I’m the real thing in the way of silver-tongued orators.”, he responds “I guess you are not to blame for your misfortunes, but we have no use for you here.” Its hard to imagine a blunter dismissal of PMC values. Like modern populists, he rails against elites, who he charges with hypocritical moralism and petty tyranny “We don’t own our streets or anything else…we’ve got to eat and drink what they tell us to eat and drink, and…choose our time for eating and drinking to suit them. If they don’t feel like taking a glass of beer on Sunday, we must abstain. If they have not got any amusements up in their backwoods, we must have none. We’ve got to regulate our whole lives to suit them. And then we must pay their taxes to boot.” These elites aren’t only tyrannical, they’re unpatriotic “Nobody pays any attention to the Fourth of July any longer except Tammany and the small boy. When the Fourth comes, the reformers, with revolutionary names parted in the middle, run off to Newport or the Adirondacks to get out of the way of the noise.”
This is striking because historically, cities have been recruiting pools for “progressive” movements, where “progressive” broadly means “someone who wants to replace the established order with something new.” There’s a danger in over-extrapolating from recent history, but this really does seem to be a pattern. Many of the most radical excesses of the French Revolution were driven by attempts to appeal to the sans-culottes of the Paris mob. Conversely, the revolutionaries imposed some of their most brutal repressive measures in the rural Vendee. A century later, orthodox Marxists famously thought that Russia was not yet ready for a revolution because the urban working class was still too small a percentage of the population. This pattern is embedded in our very language. The word “Pagan” derives from the Latin word for “rustic”. It’s modern usage originated in the period where Christianity had become an elite religion but had not yet been fully imposed on bitter-clingers in rural parts of the empire. The modern analogs would be the trumpenproletariat in flyover country.
How do we square this circle? I think part of it is that “populism” in common usage tends to be something intended to appeal to working class voters, who as a group are usually social conservative but economically liberal. In the modern world, populism is associated with rural areas because structural changes to the economy have skewed urban populations towards professionals rather than the working class. Per Wikipedia, in 1910 only 37, 200 Bachelors degrees were awarded across the whole country, in a population of just under 92 million. Of that 92 million, nearly 5 million (4,766,883)lived in New York. 4,766,883/37,200 = .008. In other words, even if every college graduate in the country had lived in New York City, they would have made up less than one percent of the population. By contrast, today 39.5% of NYC has a Bachelors or higher. And NYC isn’t even in the top five most educated cities in America! Likely in the eighteenth-through-early twentieth centuries – the heyday of the industrial revolution – urban populations were skewed in the opposite direction than they are now.
Of course, that doesn’t explain the other instances of urban progressivism cited above. I think we can chalk that up to these movements being an alliance between elite-aspirants and the working class, with the elite-aspirants providing the socially-liberal rhetoric of the movement, while the footsoldiers are largely motivated by pragmatic material concerns. This is as close as I have to working explanation, unless of course you think that the progressivism-urbanism association is all a mirage.
In lieu of ideological appeal, technically wonkery, or even a charismatic public persona, Plunkitt offers a vision of politics based on personal relationships and the rendering of services. He began in politics by getting his cousin to promise him his vote – not to Plunkitt personally but to whoever Plunkitt told him to vote for. Plunkitt offered this vote, along with his own, to the district leader. Then he recruited two of his old school-friends. “Before long, I had sixty men back of me and formed the George Washington Plunkitt association.”
In return for these votes, Plunkitt was offered positions in government. The exact position seems to have changed as the voting blocs he commanded grew in size. Its less clear from the text what exactly these individual voters received. Certainly as Plunkitt grew in power in the organization, he could offer jobs to some of his supporters. Judging by his repeated denunciations of civil service reform, this kind of patron-client relationship was key to the whole edifice. But of course, there couldn’t have been enough full time jobs to hand one out to every voter. The whole thing wouldn’t scale. Plunkitt’s access to the apparatus of government probably meant he could hand out contracting opportunities even when he didn’t have a full time job on hand. He says as much. But a lot of it also seems to come down to small acts of friendship and making people like you. “I know every man, woman, and child in the fifteenth district, except them that’s been born this summer – and I know some of them too…I reach them by approaching them at the right side…I hear of a young feller that’s proud of his voice, thinks he can sing fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join our Glee Club. He comes and sings and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball dub. That fixes him. You’ll find him working for my ticket at next election day. Then there’s the feller that likes rowin on the river, the young feller that makes a name as a waltzer on his block, the young feller that’s handy with his dukes. I rope them all in by givin them opportunities to show off.” Presumably the various public observances which Plunkitt alludes to were excellent opportunities for generating this kind of social capital.
These acts of friendship could also take a more practical form. “What tells in holdin’ your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help. I’ve got a regular system for this. If there’s a fire…any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines. If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things running again.”
Obviously there’s no statistics provided. But my intuition tells me this sort of thing was probably pretty effective. I grew up comfortably middle class; I’ve never known what its like to be worried about where my next meal will come from or where I’ll sleep. I’ve never worried about whether my wife or my kid will have enough to eat. If I was worried about that – well I don’t think there’s much I wouldn’t do for someone who solved that problem for me. Leaving intuition aside this model – tangible benefits for friends and family in exchange for loyalty – is arguably what leadership looked like for most of human history. Reciprocal altruism is a bedrock of human behavior. The intimate nature of such exchanges elevates them beyond the merely transactional; emotional ties soon develop and invest these relationships with the aura of the sacred. I’ve little doubt Plunkitt’s methods were effective. For that matter, I have little doubt that from inside, most participants in the machine were perfectly satisfied with the arrangement.
What caused the decline of machine politicians? And were they as bad as modern opinion holds? The first question can be answered more or less satisfactorily. The second is mostly a matter of opinion. The most commonly cited factor in the decline of the machines is the introduction of the direct party primary. Nowadays, we take it for granted that party members come together in a sort of internal election to vote on who they’ll put forward as a candidate for. Since politics is our national sport, presidential primaries often get breathless coverage in the media. But in fact, this wasn’t common for much of our history. Direct primaries were fairly rare prior to the mid-nineteenth century and didn’t really pick up steam until around the turn of the century. Prior to that, it was common for local voters to select delegates to a nominating convention, who in turn would choose the candidate. In theory, the transition to direct primaries allowed candidates to “cut out the middleman” i.e. intra-party elites and “bosses” and appeal directly to voters. Plunkitt and his ilk, who relied on horse-trading rather than offering a coherent vision of the common good, were finished.
This triumphalist narrative remains common. Its not entirely wrong so much as it is incomplete. This study suggests that the introduction of direct primaries was correlated with a decrease in Congressional representatives (both Senate and House) voting in line with party leaders. Insofar as “party leaders” are a proxy for the old school bosses, we can say that that this represents a weakening of their power. But direct primaries are only part of the story.
Another major part is this: technological and demographic changes made interpersonal connections an inefficient way to mobilize voters. In 1793, the House of Representatives was only 105 members. Today, it has 435, a number set by law in 1929. In 1793, there were roughly 34,000 voters per representative. Today the ration is roughly 1: 761,000, an order of magnitude higher. While I don’t have data for state and municipal legislatures, its safe to assume the same trend holds.
“Dunbar’s Number” is the theoretical upper limit on the amount of close relationships anyone can have. Estimates vary between 150 and a little over 200, but the bottom line is this: for most of our existence as a species, humanity operated in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers. We evolved to handle a certain number of point-to-point contacts. Past that limit, it becomes necessary to start sorting people into categories of one sort or another. A politician in a district with, say, 500 people can personally know a large chunk of them. In a district with 5000, he can know fewer, but his ward heeler subordinates might still know many on an individual level. But by the time you hit 500,000, this sort of personalized relationship is impossible. Even if you maintained a small army of volunteers to go around and engage with individual voters, said volunteers would soon themselves exceed Dunbar’s number, diluting the strength of their relationship to the politico.
Instead of cultivating relationships with individuals, you cultivate relationships with voting blocs. Farmers, lawyers, blue-collar workers, gun owners etc. Legions of specialists search for ever-more-subtle coalitions of interest to solicit. This is where broadcast media becomes important. Broadcast media is a way of efficiently marketing to large numbers of potential voters, far more efficient than simply going door-to-door.
Its not only the politicians who start sorting people into boxes based on professional, ethnic, or social status. The voters will do that themselves. At one time, people’s sense of identity was largely local – their town, their neighborhood, their block. But as the world flattens and the flow of information, goods, and services becomes ever-less constrained by geography, people start to think of themselves in larger terms: a Christian, a lawyer, a Republican, an X, Y, Z. These larger identities have always been present of course, but they make up an increasingly greater portion of any given individuals sense of themselves. Plunkitts’s methods relied on local ties that are increasingly less important.
Another major factor was Plunkitt’s great white whale “the curse of civil service reform.” While Plunkitt was presumably most concerned with New York’s Civil Service reform, these developments were merely reflective of larger trends in the country. For most of the nineteenth century, government administrative jobs had been distributed at the discretion of elected officials. But in 1883, Chester A. Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act, which provided for certain federal jobs to awarded on the bases of competitive examinations rather than by administrative fiat. Those who had gotten their jobs through competitive examinations could not subsequently be removed for “political reasons”. At the time, the act covered only a small percentage of the executive. But, in a true stroke of genius, the act was written with a “ratchet provision” which allowed the president to add positions to those covered under the Pendleton act. So, if your side was likely to lose the election, you could add all your appointees to the rolls right before leaving office, and your successor couldn’t remove them. After enough iterations of this process, about 90% of the civil service was covered under the act. While the Pendleton act only covered federal civil service jobs, a similar process seems to have taken place within various states.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, one is half-tempted to ask: do you want the deep state? Because this is how you get the deep state. In the process of enshrining their ideals in law, the professional-managerial class of the day created the legal basis for entrenched bureaucracies to pursue their collective interests even in the face of opposition from the nominal chief executive. Debates about the role of meritocracy aside, Civil Service reform went a long way towards eliminating the middle ranks of the machines, those on whom men like Plunkitt relied.
The bureaucratization of the civil service also contributed to the ballooning of the administrative law sector, which further eroded the ability of elected officials to actually make a difference in the lives of their constituents. Remember when Plunkitt said that local charities would get around to doing something just about the time that a family was starved to death? One of the services machine politicians provided their constituents was the ability to apply pressure on the machinery of the state. If, say, you felt that your property had been unfairly seized, or you had been denied something you were owed, or you had been inconvenienced in some way by The Man, you could turn to your ward heeler, who in turn could bring the matter to your local elected representative. Nowadays – you’d hire a lawyer.
America is almost unique in the extent to which the actions of executive agencies are dictated by lawsuits or the fear of lawsuits. The Equal Protection Clause means effectively, anyone can sue a government agency for virtually anything. The most well-known application of this on the Motte is probably the collection of legal decisions arising from civil rights law which has contributed to the institutionalization of progressive tendencies throughout the public and private sector. This is correlated with explosive growth in the legal profession. In 1960, there was roughly one lawyer for 627 people in the country. By 1987, there was one lawyer for every 354 people. Today, there is roughly one lawyer for every 250 people. Notably, some 30% of Representatives and 51% of Senators have law degrees. To a large extent, the politician as advocate has been replaced by the lawyer as advocate. Instead of being compensated by votes, today’s advocates are compensated in publicity and cash. Rule of law becomes rule of lawyers.
All that said, were the machine politicians so bad? I’ll admit that I am somewhat tempted to romanticize Plunkitt and all his spiritual kin, from Boss Tweed to Enoch L Johnson. Undoubtedly they were self-interested, but no more than any other politician. They made it their business to know their constituents and to provide something meaningful to them. Above all, they seemed to have been accessible. They gave their constituents a sense of agency, a feeling that there was something they could do and someone they could turn to when things went wrong or when they were being pushed around. How many of us can say the same? If, for example, my local police department confiscated my property in a civil forfeiture case, I would have no choice but to pursue a costly and time-consuming remedy through the courts. I’m fortunate enough that I could probably afford it; many others couldn’t.
At the same time, I’ve already discussed the major limitation of such political machines: they simply don’t scale. In the savage war of all against all, scale is everything. The big fish eat the little fish and organizations – political, economic, or social – which can more effectively mobilize greater resources usually out compete the smaller ones. Even if such an arrangement could survive, I expect that in time it would lose the qualities that make it appealing. A political machine would eventually become vulnerable to the same oligarchical dynamics as every other political system, and the machine politicians as detached and self-absorbed as every other elite.
Join me, then, in raising a glass to Plunkitt and all his tribe. Like Haast’s eagle, the woolly mammoth, or the horse nomads who conquered half the world, they were magnificent in their day. But their day has passed. The world has changed; I do not think we will see his kind again, for better or for worse.