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'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.
“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.
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.
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?
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
[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:
I was going to post this on my substack. But nothing is on it, and now this is not even on it, because I decided to post here, for better or worse. For those of you who have accidentally clicked on posts of mine before and recoiled, note that this is more of the same, and you’d best go ahead and scroll elsewhere now. There is no conclusion or point, and I certainly do not talk about Hamas or Jared Kushner or trans- (insert noun). No. The journey is the destination. Or however it goes. The destination is the journey. Whatever. This is the story of a colonoscopy. That should tell you enough.
I should play you some of that relaxing music that was in my head as I lay sideways on an examination table wearing my black nylon tear-away pants with the fly in the rear, gazing blankly at the video screen which was tilted down toward me as if to play the opening credits of Fantastic Voyage. I think I was humming in my head Billie Holiday's Embraceable You.
In order to not bury the lede, let me tell you what the doctor said at the end (there are many unintentional puns in this), so that you are not gripped by too much suspense and worry for my wellbeing. He said—and I felt he did not want to say this, that he would have preferred to say almost anything else—he said in what I imagined was a quieter voice than he normally used: “You’re fine.” Or that equivalent in Japanese. Actually what he said, clicking on his computer, the monitor of which now revealed neat squares of color slides depicting the interior of my colon: “綺麗.” That’s kirei, which means beautiful. It’s what you say about exceptionally attractive women, or sunsets, or flowers. It can also contextually mean clean, which in my case meant “There is no problem here with your colon.”
Two years ago, I went to my urologist because I had felt a pain in my lower abdomen that seemed wrong. It was not like any pain I had felt before. Probably. The urology clinic I go to is run by two older Japanese doctors who are there on alternating days, but my カルテ or file is the same for each, so they both have the same data on my PSA and creatinine and whatever else is measured in a urinalysis. The one doctor I seemed to keep getting on my appointment days is the more doubtful, less friendly one, and also the one who has the distinction of having done DRE on me more than any other doctor. DRE for those not aware means digital rectal examination. It is exactly what it sounds like, if you aren’t the type of person who assumes digital means something that might be shown on the readout of a G-Shock timepiece. No, digital means, in its barest sense here, finger.
He was stumped. Wherefore this pain? He asked me many questions in Japanese, and I tried to answer all of them as well as I could. It hurts here, yes. No I don’t have trouble urinating, no more than the usual with a prostate such as mine, at my age. On my insistence that I did in fact feel pain in the area I had indicated, he referred me to a research hospital up the road, writing a letter, enclosing a CD. He gave all this to me in a sealed envelope and sent me on my way. To the department of psychosomatic disorders.
The research hospital concerned is about ten years old, at least in its current incarnation in this set of buildings, and is still clean, has the requisite coffee shop on the second floor where one hears the reassuring and soothing clink of saucers and china cups, old people murmuring to one another as they take their morning repast of a “morning set”. Perceived as a whole the hospital as an institution would probably engender confidence even in the cynical. Clean carpets, working bright lights, purposeful movement, even the sick and probably dying blanketed and wheeled about on quiet gurneys seem to be in the best possible shape, considering. Like the Holidays Inn of my youth, before they became camp and moldy: All seems well-planned and expertly run. The nurses are more often attractive than not, at least from the bridge of the nose up (everyone is in masks in hospitals in Japan, all the time). The greeters and information desk personnel are female, lithe, and efficient, and give one a sense of being in the right hands.
The psychosomatic intake involved an interview of many minutes conducted by a nurse who seemed too young to be charged with adult crimes, should she commit any. I remember her as very pleasant and patient, and after about a half hour of interview as we were wrapping up I discovered via random throwaway phatic question that she spoke English rather well (the entire interview had been in Japanese, including my stumbling bumbling Japanese answers.) There was a time when this would have annoyed me. That time passed years ago. Now I just roll with it. People don’t like speaking English.
When I was finally allowed to sit in the presence of the doctor, who wheeled his chair the meter or so in and out from his desk expertly, and had the practiced look of a man who cares, and probably cares even about you, he told me, after a minute or two of speaking Japanese, to just say my whole spiel in English, to just get it out. Which I did, and briefly: I have pains here, and here, and I don’t know what is causing them and I would like to know. He then asked, in Japanese again: “What would be your ideal outcome here? What would you like us to say?”
I felt he must have learned these phrases in the elementary level courses that one takes in dealing with neurotic patients, the same courses that cause one to end up practicing in the psychosomatic disorder department. I did not say this. I did say: “I want someone to say ‘Oh, we’ve seen these symptoms before; this is probably what you have, let’s do a test.’” I do not know how I expected him to react to this, but it seemed as if I had given exactly the right response. If he had looked down and checked off a box on a clipboard, he could not have given off a more reassuring vibe. At last, it seemed some kind of examination would begin, rather than the type of qualifying session I felt I had been subjected to.
Please lie on an examination table. Okay. He palpated me deeply in the lower abdomen asking repeatedly “Itai? Kore wa?” “Does it hurt? How about here?” I realized during this examination that one can actually push fairly deep down into the abdomen presumably without causing damage, but when I finally did say “Yes, that hurts” it seemed such an obvious statement (as in: Why wouldn’t it hurt when you push basically all the way through my body?”) that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could learn anything from it, any more than if he had jammed a knife into my leg and asked the same question.
He nodded. He seemed to be thinking very carefully. He typed a bit on his computer, mumbling that I could get up from the table and put my shoes back on. I sat up and waited. This was how I was scheduled to get my first colonoscopy two years ago.
Fast forward in time to last week. Now we are at colonoscopy Number Two, which has been ordered for me by my local doctor, who has written the referral letter, again with a CD, though this time I am sent to the gastroenterology department. The pains have returned, though the first colonoscopy (and endoscopy, which was another day and involved a tube down my nose) showed nothing out of the ordinary. One polyp (not a word one wants to imagine, though apparently polyps after a point are normal) but it was removed, and found to be benign.
This time, I have been scheduled to have the procedure on a Thursday, and have cleared my schedule and bowels for this purpose. The way one prepares for a colonoscopy may be well-known to some of you, but I will iterate it here for the uninformed. According to the internet one is supposed to consume only a liquid diet the day prior, and cease all medication such as aspirin which would increase the chance of bleeding. There are various dangers if the colon has not been completely voided and a colonoscopy is conducted, among them a term I recently learned: intracolonic explosion. I do not even want to know how this term was coined or in what circumstances. (That is not an image link.)
In Japan, however, there are little boxes they let you buy for about 10 bucks that contain what are called レトルトパウチ or retort pouches that contain MRE-like substances, and these are supposed to get you all set. Each box has five pouches, three meals and two that contain watery rice. You are supposed to pour the contents into a pot or bowl and either briefly boil or microwave them.
The box has on its cover the various meals you will be eating on the day before. It looks like this. You can see each “meal” such as it is on the box, plus some little pills are there that I was supposed to take. The first meal, the breakfast, is here in its pouch, and then looked like this when I poured it in the bowl. It looked better in the pouch. Rice and stewed chicken and some egg. The lunch was daikon radish, more chicken but minced this time, and, according to my youngest son, some potatoes. It looked like this.
There were also two packets of the watery rice I mentioned, similar to what is known here as お粥 or okayu, which is the Japanese equivalent to the traditional chicken soup, i.e. it’s what you eat when sick, but without the egg that is usually a part of that dish. I dumped one of these on the dinner, which, in a contest, would have to be called the best of all the meals, but so Spartan as to be disappointing, though by the time you get to eating dinner you are so hungry that you are imagining if maybe you can just forgo the procedure altogether and just go grab a goddam cheeseburger. I was too hungry to take a photo at that point but here is what the box claims the dinner looks like.
Anyway over the course of the day I warmed all these up and ate them and drank a bunch of water and took the two little pills at 9 pm. The instructions said to then drink a cup of water at 10 pm but by then I just wanted to lose consciousness, so I drank the water with the pills. I went to sleep early as my family ate stewed yellowtail, white rice, garlic scapes with sesame, and miso soup.
On the Day Of, you wake and unsurprisingly you’re hungry. You are not supposed to eat or drink coffee, so I did not. I did drink some water. I put on sweatpants, wore the kind of sandals that slip right off, got all my stuff, and took the bus in. The instructions also say not to drive, as you will be woozy from the drugs they give. I remember the first time I had one of these, the drugs were very effective. This time they would not be, but I did not know that going in.
I won’t bore you with the details of checking in and finding my way to the right department, but all went efficiently. Eventually I was cordoned off with a group of two men and three women who were also scheduled for the procedure. I am not young, but everyone looked much older than I feel I look or am. But who knows. Everyone was wearing a mask, including me. They sat us all down at tables and put in front of us these big jugs of fluid, which had our names written on them in black ink. That jug looks like this.(My name is on the side that is turned around.)
If you are thinking to yourself “That’s a lot of fluid” you are thinking the same thing I thought. And it is. It’s two liters.
The nurse at this point is going on and on in Japanese about what to do. She is very animated and friendly and you can tell she has done this lecture many times. It is like a performance, a routine, she hits certain points like punchlines, and we all breathe in a laughing-like way accordingly at these moments. Drink 250 ml in the first 15 minutes. Then another 250 ml in the next 15. By then you should have gone to the toilet at least once. If we have not, we are informed, we shall be given an enema. This seems a foreboding prospect, despite what awaits us. Somehow an enema seems worse than a colonoscopy. We are also given more little pills to take. This is the blister pack of mine. I had greedily swallowed them before I thought to take a photo for posterity.
The next photo you might not want to click on. It is a little laminated paper with six five photos that we are told are the stages of what our voiding will look like. The first is dark, then they get progressively lighter. Like a little picture book of defecation. Here is what that looks like. You will note the cute little bear in the top right, because everything in Japan must have a cute mascot associated with it, even the act of crapping.
If you did not click it’s fine, but the last pic of the stages is clearish, like very weak tea. At this stage, if this is what you are producing out your rear end, you are a Go for the colonoscopy and you are supposed to call the nurse into the john and have her inspect it to be sure.
I begin drinking. After 20 minutes I have had about 300 ml of the stuff, which tastes like poor quality Gatorade with no sugar and too much salt. I excuse myself and sure enough I will not be one of the enemized, which is good news. Time passes and the nurse has switched on the television. She has said we should not just sit there and watch it, but that is what everyone does—all except one old guy who prefers to stare at the corner in the opposite direction, as if mourning all the mistakes in his life that led him to this little squalid room. Instead of sitting there and watching TV the nurse encourages us to walk around, and even to push in on our abdomen to get the process rolling. I take a stroll, come back, and watch the TV again. On the television there is a show called ラビット which reads like “Rabbit” but I realize is supposed to be “Love It.” On the show three extremely homely guys who are probably comedians are visiting a racetrack and oohing and ahhing over it. With these guys is one extremely attractive woman, but before I can try and follow what it is they are all doing at the track I have to excuse myself again.
Eventually I’m ready, after about six trips to the restroom. The bowl looks so clear it is as if I haven’t even sat on it. I push the chime and the nurse very excitedly runs up, much in the same was if I were an elementary school child who just announced that he finished making some bit of artwork and she, my teacher, has come to admire it. “Ooh that’s perfect,” she says, gazing into the toilet bowl. “You’re ready,” she says.
She escorts me to another small locker room. I have left behind my cohorts, who are all quietly drinking and sitting and contemplating the television, except the one sad man. Two of the women have struck up a conversation. Their voices dim as I walk down the hall to the locker room. The nurse says to take off all my clothes and put on a little pair of black nylon pants, and then put on what looks like a blue pajama top thing, something like Luke Skywalker might wear on Tatooine. Then put my stuff in the locker. A beat or two passes and I am wondering if she is going to watch me do all this, but she leaves and closes the door behind her. There is no lock on the door, so I make haste. The fly, she has noted, is in the rear of the nylon trousers, for obvious reasons.
Clad in this getup, I step out. I am still wearing my athlete’s sandals. The nurse takes me past my cohort again, and they are all still drinking or sitting waiting to drink. Their Japanese politeness prevents them from acknowledging me, though my American friendliness feels somehow hurt by this, as if they might cheer me on. I go first, wish me luck sort of thing. Maybe they just don’t care at all. I go into a room where another nurse is busy with something. This room seems less clean than the rest of the hospital. Scuff marks, signs of wear. She wheels over a rolling upright pole with an IV bag on it and wipes my arm with alcohol. As she is inserting the needle I can’t think of anything to say so I say: “Your watch is nice.” It is, though my eyes are so bad at focusing on close things I cannot tell if it is a Jaeger-leCoultre or just some offbrand. Probably the latter if she’s a nurse in a research hospital, but you never know. She says thank you in a polite way but I imagine she thinks I am an idiot. Which, I think, I am at this moment.
(continued in reply post due to character limit.)
I think I found this more interesting than the original biography review by Scott. There is a lot of distilled wisdom in these posts.
However, there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence.
Where I am now in life I interact almost exclusively with smart people. Not just high IQ wiz kids with no experience. But people that have both the raw brain power, and the life experience to be sharp and wicked smaht. I'm in a rich neighborhood, and wealth has a noticeable correlation with IQ. I currently work for an institution that employs academics who must explain their work to the media (so they can't just sit in an ivory tower and write illegible crap). I use to work at a tech company that for quite a few years basically gave people an IQ test before they could join, and they were willing to fire people who didn't work out (the selection effects weren't perfect but they were certainly noticeable). My college friends were mostly from an "honors" section that got scholarships and accolades for academic achievements.
This was not always the case.
I went to highschool in a nice-ish area. The highschool was pretty decent for where I lived, but it still had noticeable rates of teenage pregnancy, drunk driving fatalities, minor gang fights (no more than temporary hospitalizations), about a fifth of the school below the poverty line, and a racial mix that actually came pretty close to matching America's general racial mix.
This highschool had dumb-dumbs. Probably something close to an average amount of dumb-dumbs. But at the time it was painful how many of them there were. I am smart for the general population, but a bit of a dumb-dumb when I get into smart people circles. 95th percentile on SATs. 1 in 20 seems only ok, but in a random class of ~30 kids I was likely to be the smartest or 2nd smartest. And its not the academic under performance that ever bothered me. I wasn't in any position to judge, I did well on standardized tests, but I was solidly a B student at best. Most of the material seemed dumb and stupid. We were all often doing equally bad at it. It was the everything else that bothered me about interacting with chronically stupid people.
I often heard people brag growing up that they were "street smart" while some academic achiever was "book-smart". This gave me the false impression that there were two kinds of people out there and there was just a trade off between the two. That was badly wrong. Some people are just dumb. They can fail to learn how to read, and fail at not walking into oncoming traffic, and fail at not picking a fight with a group of kids that will kick their ass. There are people that just seem to make repeatedly bad decisions in all areas of their life. I grew to hate these people, because loving and caring about them was too painful. To watch them make terrible decisions again and again, no matter how you advise them, no matter how much you try its like they seem determined to make their own lives a living hell by refusing to understand the world around them.
Bringing this back around to Elon Musk:
Yes he is smart. He is very smart. If he doesn't seem that smart compared to the people around you, then congratulations you live in a smart person bubble. I live in one too, its great! No one is ever making terrible decisions that might casually endanger me. No one is starting physical fights, because words hurt their brain too much. They know all the latest social norms, and when to violate the silly ones to make a joke. I can have deep conversations with them about nearly any topic, they might not know the details, but if I make it interesting they will pick it up and participate. The people around me know how to manage their money, so they aren't ever begging me for handouts, or trying to nickle and dime me on shared expenses.
The phrase "check your privilege" comes to mind, but the tone that people normally use feels very wrong. Just imagine me saying it in the same way a surfer says "kowabunga dude!" while offering a high five.
There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
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This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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
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 here.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?"
Russell conjugation: a rhetorical technique used to create an intrinsic bias towards or against a piece of information.
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.
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.”
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.
x
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 gap
This gap between the average male and female life expectancy of given population group is alternately labeled as Life Expectancy Gender Gap (LEGG) or Gender Gap in Life Expectancy (GGLE). Going forward I will be using the LEGG acronym.
The expectancy
There are basically two types of life expectancy. In historical context, we usually refer to the Cohort Life Expectancy. We track a group of people born in a particular year, many decades ago, and observe the exact date in which each one of them died. Then we can calculate this cohort’s life expectancy by simply calculating the average of the ages of all members when they died.
It is of course not possible to know this metric before all members of the cohort have died. That is why when talking about the present and the future we use Period Life Expectancy. This is an estimate of the average length of life for a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed, from birth through death, to the mortality rates observed at one particular period – commonly the previous year. Estimates of life expectancy of the current generation, which are also used in the calculations of indexes like the Human Development Index or Gender Development Index, are of this Period Life Expectancy type.
There is a corollary: because we are judging the existing generation based on mortality rates of the previous year only, whatever happened to that generation before that year is not taken into account. So let's say. if there was a recent deadly pandemic that affected one gender disproportionally, and this pandemic ended and is not affecting the mortality rates of the previous year, there will be little evidence of said gender disproportionally in the current life expectancy estimates.
The lost years
The first important thing to know about the LEGG is that its impact is, without an exaggeration, enormous. Let's take for example the US, with a LEGG of 5.8 years at the average predicted age for men and women 73.5 and 79.3 years respectively. Do you see the enormity? You don't, do you.
Ok, let's put things into perspective - how do you measure an impact of early death? With Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL). This is an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if they had not died "prematurely". It is usually reported in years per 100,000 people and the reference, "mature" age should correspond roughly to the life expectancy of the population and is now usually given as 75 years.
Now, men and women in the US lose some 8,265 and 4,862 potential years per of life per 100,000. Given the population as 332 millions, men lose some 5,648,980 more years of potential life than women. Do you see the enormity now? Not yet?
During the roughly 3.5 years of WW2 the US lost 407,300 military and 12,100 civilian lives. With an average life expectancy back then 68 years, and a guestimated age at the time of death 21 years, every killed American lost some 47 years and the US as a whole lost some 5,640,000 potential years of life every year of the war. Do you see the enormity of the LEGG now? I think you do.
The causes
The second important think to know about the LEGG is that nobody seem to care. Biologists, statisticians, politicians, Wikipedians - not even men's rights activists - nobody seems to be franticly looking for the causes or proposing policies to stop this haemorrhage of men's lives. Let me paraphrase what Wikipedia has to says about it:
It is the life style, men drink more and smoke more and eat crap. And it is also the biology, men lack the double X chromosome, we see this across all mammalian species, plus male babies and boys dies of diseases much more than girls.
Speaking of Wikipedia, it has dedicated pages for many things, including the Orgasm gender gap, but it does not have a dedicated page for the LEGG.
To my surprise I have not been able to find any further information, neither on biology forums, nor on Google Scholar. Studies usually focus on one cause or divide the mechanisms into social and biological but there our knowledge seem to end.
At this point I was so intrigued that I decided to do some "research" myself. My first observation was that there is a great variance between developed countries with similar GDP and life expectancy, suggesting that a large part of the gap is not biological. Example:
- 2021 Norway - LE: 83.16 years, LEGG: 3,0 years
- 2021 France - LE: 82.32 years, LEGG: 6,2 years
Next, I knew where to find Eurostat data on causes of death - unfortunately only from 2010 - and I filtered out everything mechanical: suicides, assaults, accidents and drug and alcohol overdoses. The LEGG shrunk significantly:
- 2010 Norway - all LEGG: 4.54 | non-mechanical LEGG: 3,51, decrease by 29.5%
- 2010 France - all LEGG: 7.14 | non-mechanical LEGG: 6.19, decrease by 15.3%
Then I was curious how much of the LEGG is caused by mortality differences of infants and children so I calculated non-mechanical LEGG at 20 years, as opposed to LEGG at birth. The difference is negligible:
- 2010 Norway - non-mechanical LEGG at birth: 3,51, non-mechanical LEGG at 20: 3.37, difference: 3.8%
- 2010 France - non-mechanical LEGG at birth: 6.19, non-mechanical LEGG at 20: 6.07, difference: 1.7%
Next, I did one more napkin calculation. Assuming that smoking reduces the life expectancy on average by 10 yers and smoking rate among French men and women are 0.349 and 0.319 and smoking rate among Norwegian men and women are 0.17 and 0.154, I reduced the LEGG further:
- 2010 Norway - all LEGG: 4.54 | non-mechanical, non-smoking LEGG: 3,35, decrease by 35.7%
- 2010 France - all LEGG: 7.14 | non-mechanical, non-smoking LEGG: 5.89, decrease by 21.2%
Of course this does not mean the reminder is caused by biological factors. There are drugs and alcohol, there is a meat consumption and overall life style. Man also do more paid work so there is work related stress and exposure. It should not be a rocket science to isolate these factors, actually, it would amount to a very cool paper with plenty of citations. So where is this paper?
Actually, I found one piece of information: Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations, the abstract talks about 11,000 Bavarian monks and nuns living in "very nearly identical behavioral and environmental conditions" with nuns having only a "slight advantage" in life expectancy - whatever that means, I can't access the paper itself. This of course only applies to men and women who already survived into their teens or twenties, but as we saw above the contribution of different child mortality to LEGG is negligible.
The bad and the ugly
FYI, about 80% of suicide victims are men and suicide is the second leading cause of death in middle aged men only after car accidents. Also, 90% of workplace accidents are men - constructions, mining, trucking, heavy industry, you know - and even though the total numbers are too small to meaningfully influence the LEGG it does not cover exposure to chemicals, hard labour or health impact of night shifts.
Some social and biological mechanisms out there are causing men to lose life equivalent to WW2 every year. We should be creating policies to reduce this loss but we don't. Why? We know that men are far less likely than women to visit a doctor. Where are the public health campaigns and safe driving campaign targeted at men specifically?
Could it be the case of "you grow what you measure"? UN's Gender Development Index that measures gender disparity in achievements between men and women very quietly removes 5 years from the LEGG in it's calculations, arguing that men living 5 years shorter is necessary biology. The Global Gender Gap Report published annually by the World Economic Forum does something similar, arguing that if women live at least 6% longer than men, parity is assumed - but if it is less than 6% it counts as a gender gap.
As a corollary, women is Norway living only 3 years longer than men is interpreted as oppression.
Mottizens sometimes use terms with obscure origins that can be confusing to newcomers. This is an attempt to provide a brief explanation of what these terms mean and where they came from to help anyone new to the community.
50 Stalins: A style of commentary which pretends to criticize something while actually praising it, e.g. “critiquing” Stalinist Russia by suggesting that it is not Stalinist enough and it should have even more Stalins. The term was coined by Scott Alexander in Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-sized Nutshell (2013).
Chinese Robber Fallacy: A dishonest argument that uses a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even when the other groups have the problem just as much, e.g. complaining about the problem of Chinese robbers without providing evidence that Chinese people are more likely to be robbers than other groups. It was first described by blogger Alyssa Vance in 2015.
CultureWarRoundup / CWR: A splinter community of the Motte that lives at the subreddit /r/CultureWarRoundup, founded primarily by users who felt that the Motte's moderation policies were too strict. It has very little moderation.
Effective Altruism / EA : A philosophical and social movement that aims to use evidence and reason to do the most good possible. It has a lot of overlap with the rationalist community and LessWrong and experienced much of its early growth on LessWrong.
Human Biodiversity / HBD: A viewpoint that holds that there are socially relevant differences between groups of people that are genetic in origin. Most controversially, HBD advocates generally maintain that the observed differences between the average intelligence of people of different races originate in genetics.
Ideological Turing Test / ITT: An exercise where you try to pretend to hold an opposing ideology convincingly enough that outside observers can't reliably distinguish you from a true believer. It was first described by economist Bryan Caplan in 2011.
LessWrong: A discussion forum founded by AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009. The forum focuses on cognitive biases, rationality, artificial intelligence, and other topics. It is the primary nexus for the so-called “rationalist community.” LessWrong could be considered an ancestor forum to the Motte, since Scott Alexander blogged there before founding Slate Star Codex and this community originated in the subreddit for Slate Star Codex.
Lizardman's Constant: The share of the population (around 4%) who gives absurd responses in opinion polls (such as saying that lizardmen run the world); perhaps a combination of trolls, people who don't understand the question, people who just want to agree with the pollster, and people who are completely apathetic to the poll. It was coined by Scott Alexander in Lizardman's Constant is 4% (2013).
Motte and Bailey fallacy: A dishonest form of argument where one conflates two positions, one easy to defend but with limited implications (the motte) and another hard to defend but with far-reaching implications (the bailey). The fallacy was named after a kind of castle. It was coined by the philosopher Nicholas Shakel in 2005 and popularized by Scott Alexander via Social Justice and Words, Words, Words (2014) and All in All, Another Brick in the Motte (2014). The motte-and-bailey fallacy is the namesake of the Motte; in this community, we would like people to only hold positions that they can defend.
Neoreaction / NRx: A right-wing political philosophy whose signature viewpoint is that monarchy is a better form of government than democracy. Its most famous advocate is the blogger Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug. The neoreactionary movement first grew on LessWrong, although they were always a very small faction there.
Prior: A term from Bayesian Statistics that essentially means one's belief about something before they take new evidence into account. To say that one's prior is X is essentially to say that one's belief is X. To say that one has "adjusted their priors" is essentially to say that one has changed one's mind to some degree about the topic at hand based on the evidence presented; in theory this is done by applying Bayes' theorem.
Quokka: A kind of Australian macropod. They have no natural predators and are therefore not particularly fearful. Some people, beginning with a 2020 Twitter thread by “Zero HP Lovecraft”, who believe rationalists are too trusting or naive compare rationalists to Quokkas.
Rationalist: An online community of people originally formed around the blog Overcoming Bias, founded in 2006 by economist Robin Hanson and AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky; the discussion forum LessWrong, founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky; and the blog Slate Star Codex, founded in 2013 by Scott Alexander. The rationalist community is generally focused on cognitive bias and reason. Because the Motte originated in the subreddit for Slate Star Codex, it could be considered part of a rationalist “diaspora.”
rDrama: A humorous forum about Internet drama. Originally the subreddit /r/drama, the community now lives at rdrama.net. The Motte forked the code they use to run their site when we moved from Reddit to this website in 2022 because it was a proven example of a Reddit community successfully moving offsite and had many of the features we wanted.
Red Tribe / Blue Tribe / Gray Tribe: Terms used to describe different cultural groups in America. The terms were coined by Scott Alexander in I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014). They are sometimes used interchangeably with the concepts of Republicans (Red Tribe) and Democrats (Blue Tribe), but in their original conception, Red Tribe (or Blue Tribe) meant something more precisely stated as “the sorts of people likely to be Republicans (or Democrats), regardless of their actual political views.” For example, a vegan Harvard graduate who lives in Manhattan and loves musical theater is part of the Blue Tribe even if he is actually politically conservative. The Gray Tribe is a sub-tribe of the Blue Tribe characterized by things like working in STEM fields and often having libertarian-ish politics.
Scissor Statement: A highly controversial statement that reliably provokes arguments. Coined by Scott Alexander in Sort By Controversial (2018), a work of fiction in which scissor statements are generated by a machine learning system trained on Reddit comments.
Slate Star Codex / SSC / Astral Codex Ten / Scott Alexander: Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist who lives in the Bay
Area. He blogged from 2013-2020 at Slate Star Codex and since 2021 at Astral Codex Ten. The Motte was created as a subreddit in 2019 as the home for a weekly "culture war roundup" thread that was hosted on the subreddit for SSC until then. The culture war roundup threads were removed from /r/slatestarcodex at Scott Alexander’s request. Scott Alexander’s writings are a major influence on the norms of this community. His blog and the community around it are generally considered part of the rationalist community. Scott Alexander was a popular writer at LessWrong before founding SSC and the community around SSC has a lot of overlap with LessWrong.
SneerClub: A community of people critical of the rationalist community, including the Motte, that lives at the subreddit /r/SneerClub.
Steelman: The strongest possible form of an opposing argument; the opposite of a strawman.
TheSchism: A splinter community of the Motte founded in 2020 that lives at the subreddit /r/TheSchism.
Weakman: A weak argument that someone has actually made (so it’s not a strawman). A poor form of argument is to choose the weakest argument that someone has actually made in favor of a position and argue against that while ignoring stronger arguments for that position.
This is a short first-person account of schizophrenia from a professional philosopher. I thought it might be of interest to y'all, in part because of the way that the author thinks through his hallucinations. His allusion to "hermeneutical justice" also seems worthy of reflection. It has long seemed to me that the most important thing anyone can have is a close and supportive family (==a network of unconditional long-term commitments to mutual well-being), and that some of the worst ideas in human history have been driven by people who lack a close and supportive family looking for ways to compensate. To have spent 30 years as a successful academic in spite of brushes with "near-collapses," thanks primarily to the efforts of a wife and a close friend, is perhaps even more interesting than the first-person account of rationally managing hallucinations.