self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
Basically, leftists have a cognitohazard blind spot on this topic because if they allow themselves to even consider biological inequality then the superstructure of their belief system goes right back to the stuff of nightmares.
Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis. They were European, they were less than left wing, and they practiced both positive and negative eugenics. More Aryan Uber-babies with three blue eyes (more is better), fewer gypsies and schizophrenics.
The Right is hardly over its own hangups in that department.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
All well and good so long as we remember that "Merit" as measured by IQ is just the ability to do well in school and learn complicated things. It is not some end, just a talent like hand-eye coordination.
Just "learn complicated things"?
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
IQ is strongly correlated to a ton of good things, moderately correlated to a tonne more of other good things, and then weakly correlated with the metric fuck-ton of everything left. Income, physical and mental health, job performance! Even beauty is weakly correlated (so much for the Halo effect as a true fallacy). There are few things that can be tested as cheaply and easily while offering as much signal for the downstream traits we care about.
A quadrillion IQ brain floating in the void isn't worth very much, but we were never talking about intelligence in isolation. If grip strength was the defining factor for success in life, I'd be working on my handshake right now.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
As someone who is somewhat aristocratic (my family did not pay for Oxbridge's anything, but 200 years ago they probably could have) you are misunderstanding how it works. Think of it as meritocracy with a sliding window and a small momentum factor.
I do think of it that way? I meant to gesture at that when I said:
This is far from the worst approach. The elites are elites for a reason. That reason is often hereditary. Even total regime change and societal upheaval usually has the dispossessed children of nobility (or the elites) almost inevitably percolate back to the top. This is evident in data from places as far-flung as China, where the grandsons of pre-revolution landlords often outperform their peers.
I agree that the reason for this phenomenon is simply innate talent in many spheres. Not even landgrabs and terrorism could keep the genes down (epigenetics is grossly overrated).
Rather than the intelligent rising to the top after a major shakeup and then camping there until the next revolution, people broadly rise or fall through their lifetimes. My family were long ago pretty influential. They made many bad choices and a few good ones, and went from 'we own a castle and a good estate' to 'we own a farm and a small business' to 'sorry, kid, I gave everything to an exotic dancer' and then back up to 'decent upper-middle class' through the generations.
I suppose I shouldn't hide that the other side of my family started off much better than my dad. They weren't ever wealthy (wealth in Colonial India often meant landed gentry, merchants etc), but they were part of a chain of well-educated intellectuals. The PMC before it was cool. Sadly for me, this never meant enough generational wealth that their kids could coast, though I haven't anything about squandered inheritance.
I don't disagree that the old system didn't have elements of meritocracy. It had plenty. At the same time, it didn't have the churn or the finding power that standardized assessments or talent screens have today. And we need a great deal more talent, nobody has enough.
This results in a society which is marginally less meritocratic but involves considerably less striving. Your brilliant father would have been unlikely to go from hauling crates to owning (a chain?) of hospitals, though it did happen, but would likely have gone from hauling crates to second-in-command of the hauling company, married to a nice girl of a higher class, with children who raised in the style of that class and who would move upwards or downwards from there according to their own ability. Especially since brilliance is more clear when IQ is slightly higher variance in your profession.
That is achingly slow! A hypothetical talented kid from a humble background can do very well for himself in 3 decades because they're on a more even (and relevant) playing field. Med school required good grades. Higher training built up experience and competence. That's a very different place to be.
I'm sure my dad would have managed to make something of himself even in the aftermath of Maoist China. But the system that got him where he is worked out better for him, and for the rest of society, if I squint.
I called the previous system "Basically Fine", the same goes for the one we have today. But that's a low bar, we can do better. As it stands, I'm more focused on eliminating the really bad distortions on meritocracy, such as affirmative action, and I'm not losing sleep over legacy admissions in the best unis.
First of all, most careers do not have uncapped potential for improvement. Let's say someone wants to become a physical therapist - they need to learn a variety of details about human physiology, be competent at working with people, and have the capacity to keep up with developments in the field. This is achievable by a 100 IQ person just as much as a 130, the primary difference will just be how much time and effort is required to acquire the knowledge. I put it to you that most fields have this characteristic. The difference between a god-tier PT and a typical one may matter a little on the edge cases but for the most part these people are indistinguishable in what they can accomplish. Meanwhile, other traits like personability and compassion may be more relevant distinguishers for how well this person does the job.
Fair point, but occupations such as physiotherapy aren't the point of contention (beyond the usual debate about whether or not they should be gated behind credentials, and if so, how heavily).
Let's talk about medicine: I would pay a sizable premium to have a shrink like Scott see me, instead of the modal kind, even if the latter delivers adequate care, and the returns diminish steeply. Outside of a single niche, better doctors/smarter-and-more-conscientious students go into the most competitive specialities. Within the same category, the truly great tend to become specialists and experts in their given domain.
Of course, the rate of return per IQ point can vary greatly. A 130 IQ janitor is just sensible about reading the signs that say "do not ever switch off the lab equipment". A hypothetical 170 IQ janitor probably won't stay a janitor for long.
On the other hand, a 130 IQ physicist might well be locked out entirely from the sorts of intellectual work a 170 IQ counterpart might produce.
Since we agree that this is heavily context dependent, and there are few/no professions where there's a negative return from IQ, we're baking the same cake, just arguing about the ratio of ingredients.
Maybe you're in or adjacent to one of these, and are really griping about how the selection methods there are failing to identify intellectual capacity?
Medicine is very regimented. A doctor twice as smart as me completes their curriculum at the same pace, I'm not aware of accelerated med school programs of any quality. I think I've done decently enough, and am probably above average as a doctor in certain ways (as per exam results), but I don't delude myself into thinking I'd be a shoe-in at Harvard Med.
This is less personal angst, and more general commentary. I don't think my kids will need a SAT coach, or the need to dig wells.
(The previous situation was Mostly Fine. I think the current state of affairs are Mostly Fine. They could still be better.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
On (Noticing) IQ (When You're Allowed To)
I was writing a reply to @TowardsPanna 's question in the SSQ thread that got a bit out of control. Large enough that I decided to just post it here too.
For what it's worth, none of these ideas are particularly new, at least they aren't if you compulsively browse LessWrong (or even read a lot of Scott), but the older I get, the more I realize that novelty is often just a nice-to-have.
Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession, or even ideological conformity - and thus more of an opaque and effectively hierarchical society? A society where appearances become more important than the underlying reality, and where presumptions are not challenged? Where the average individual, who insofar as they've been taught anything about mental horsepower, has come to believe that it's about the development and growth mindset - any child can join any profession if they work hard and choose through free will to develop smartness; and knowledge - the person in higher education studying e.g. psychology becomes smart and competent through their acquiring of knowledge and routines and joining into a professional group? The flipsides of these coins being that someone who didn't go to college/university has stupidly chosen not to become smart and grow their brain and thus can blame themselves and should not be given much time of day? And if appearances are what matters, someone with perfect grooming and high class speech and all the shibboleths should be assumed to be smart rather than looking under the hood?
Yes. Of course?
Humans aren't stupid. We’re expert pattern-matchers. We’re distinctively evolved to be relentless Bayesian updaters, constantly scanning our environment for correlations that offer a survival or status advantage. We’re Noticers™. The problem is that we’ve built a civilization where noticing the most predictive variable for life outcomes is considered a faux pas at best and a moral failing at worst. It’s common now to explicitly state, in corporate policy or legislation, that specific classes of Bayesian evidence are "fruit of the poisonous tree" and have to be ignored.
Like many well-intentioned interventions that hinge on obscuring reality, it doesn't work: when you outlaw the most accurate map, people don’t stop navigating. They just buy worse maps.
In the ancestral environment, we didn't have the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (only the Modern Hunter Gatherer has had the privilege). We did, however, have proxies. We had vocabulary size, wit, speed of learning. In the modern environment, we’ve muddied the waters. We’ve got proxies that look like intelligence but are actually just measuring conformity to the upper-middle-class Blue Tribe aesthetic. We look at credentials, which are increasingly just a measure of "willingness to sit still and follow instructions for four years."
(Please note that I don't think that education is purely credentialism. This is a disease that affects midwits first and foremost. A bachelor's in physics is a stronger signal than one in sociology.)
So when we agree to pretend that "mental horsepower" is a myth, or that it’s entirely malleable via the Growth Mindset, we don’t actually create a flat hierarchy. We just create an opaque one. We create a hierarchy based on the performance of competence rather than the reality of capacity.
This leads to a specific kind of societal gaslighting. The narrative is that anyone can be a doctor or a quantum physicist if they just work hard and acquire knowledge. If someone fails to climb the ladder, the implication is that they stupidly chose not to grow their brain. They lacked grit. They lacked character. In a world where aptitude is taboo, failure’s always a moral deficit.
The obvious analogy is a world where the Paralympics and the "normal" Olympics are wrapped up into a single event. Anyone, including the disabled athletes, who points out that missing a leg makes one very unlikely to win in the 100m sprint is immediately walloped and then piled-upon, with cries of "the Science! Not-Murray et al clearly showed, in their landmark 1998 paper, that the number of remaining lower limbs had no relation to performance in the sleighing, shooting and arm wrestling categories. The 2012 Olympics were studied in great detail, and it was confirmed that Usain Bolt had the same number and arrangement of legs as his closest competitors."
When the person with no legs fails to win the 100m sprint, the commentators nod gravely and say, "He just didn't want it enough. He failed to manifest the victory."
I see three main mechanisms driving this, and why the average person (even the smart average person) underestimates the sheer weight of g.
The "All Men Are Created Equal" Overcorrection:
We’ve engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign for decades suggesting that because moral equality is mandatory, biological identity must also be mandatory. This makes it practically unthinkable to consider that it’s perfectly possible to construct a political system that grants equal rights to all citizens while acknowledging that not everyone can visualize a rotating 3D cube with equal fidelity. But biting that bullet feels dangerous to many. It feels like opening the door to old aristocracies. So instead, we pretend the differences don't exist, which inadvertently creates a new aristocracy of "people who know the right shibboleths."
The Bubble and the Range Restriction:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
If you’re reading this, you probably spend your life surrounded by people within one standard deviation of your own IQ. You went to a selective university. You work in a cognitive field. You live in a zip code priced for high-earners.
You can go days, maybe weeks, without having a meaningful conversation with someone significantly below an IQ of 100, or even +- 1SD outside of yours.
This creates a statistical illusion known as range restriction. If you look at the NBA, height doesn't correlate very strongly with points scored. Everyone’s already tall; therefore, the variance in performance seems to come from practice, grit, and shooting form. If you looked at the general population, height would be the single biggest predictor of basketball ability (because the 5’5” guy isn't getting the rebound).
Imagine if the NBA had a rule that you couldn't mention height. You'd still need to pick players, so you'd start using proxies. You'd talk about "reach" and "wingspan" and "vertical leap." You'd notice that certain players had better "court vision" or "positional awareness." And all of these would be real skills, but they'd also be correlated with height, and height would still be determining who made it into the league in the first place. The difference is that now you'd be pretending you weren't noticing height at all, which would make you more likely to mistake the packaging for the product.
In your life as a student or a professional, you look around at your peers. You see that Alice is doing better than Bob. Since Alice and Bob are both roughly equally smart (they both made it this far), you attribute Alice’s success to her conscientiousness, her charm, or her work ethic. You conclude, erroneously, that "intelligence doesn't matter much, it’s all about hard work."
You don’t see the people who were both dumber and less hardworking than you; they’re in a different social class entirely. You rarely see the people who are simultaneously smarter and more hardworking; they’re running hedge funds or solving alignment theory and don’t hang out at the hospital cafeteria. These are far more likely to be acquaintances rather than peers.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
The Opacity of Alien Competence:
Some professions are more segregated than others. An ER physician arguably sees a more representative slice of humanity than a family medicine specialist, who sees a more representative slice than a Google L10, but the direction of judgment is difficult.
When a patient comes to see me, I’m performing a distinct ritual. I listen to symptoms, I peer at them significantly, I type things into a computer. To the patient, the output seems to appear from thin air. A sufficiently competent doctor makes it look like they never broke a sweat. A less experienced one (like me) makes up for it by projecting confidence and then panic-Googling the interaction effects of MAOIs in the bathroom later.
The patient can't judge my raw processing power. They can only judge my bedside manner, my clothes, and my degree on the wall. They’re judging the paint job.
When I'm on call and a patient is rambling in a disorganized way, using neologisms, showing thought disorder, I don't need to know their IQ score to recognize that something is cognitively wrong. But when I'm in the doctors' lounge, listening to two consultants argue about whether a patient's depressive symptoms are primarily biological or reactive, I also don't need IQ scores to know who's making the sharper arguments. The difference is that in the first case, we're allowed to talk about cognitive impairment. In the second case, we're allowed to talk about "clinical judgment" or "experience" or even "medical education," but we're not supposed to talk about the underlying mental horsepower that makes one doctor better at diagnostic reasoning than another.
(Ideally, the whole point of the medical education system and associated exams is to put the gatekeeping before patient contact. When you see an MD in the wild, you ideally want to not need to bother with asking for a transcript of their grades, nor fear that they don't know the safe limit for paracetamol. The reasons why this idyllic state of affairs doesn't hold are too lengthy to fit on this margin. Be smart about things.)
Conversely, I can't judge the competence of a senior software engineer. I know enough Python to automate a spreadsheet, but can I distinguish between a decently competent programmer and a 10x developer without referencing their credentials or status? Probably not.
This brings us back to the original shower thought. If we can't discuss the engine, we obsess over the trim.
In a "blue" environment where social class is ostensibly "over" and never discussed, it’s actually the primary sorting algorithm. We use heuristics like "do they speak with a Received Pronunciation or General American accent?" or "do they know the current correct terminology for this specific social justice concept?" to decide who’s smart.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Speaking very generally, I think society (a vague term, can't help it) needs to move in the direction of more meritocracy, not less. In practice, that looks like more standardized testing, with reduced focus on vibes.
The vibes are, paradoxically, easier to fake than the exam results:
Consider the standard critique of the SAT: "It just measures how rich your parents are."
This is statistically false. The correlation between SAT scores and parental income is real but moderate (around r = 0.4). But compare this to the correlation between parental income and "being captain of the fencing team" or "having a polished personal essay about your volunteer work in Peru" or "speaking with the correct sociolect during an interview."
The SAT is a partially gameable metric. "Holistic" traits are entirely gameable products.
If you are a rich parent with a dim child, you cannot tutor them into a 1600 SAT. You can maybe get them from a 1000 to a 1150. But you can buy them a spot in a prestigious internship. You can hire a consultant to write their essays. You can ensure they have the "right" hobbies.
Since this is my soapbox, and you're presumably still reading this far, I also want to speak out against another approach towards modern fetishization of pseudo-meritocracy, or more accurately, aristocracy.
I should probably elaborate on the @2rafa position, since she's the strongest advocate (only advocate?) She's old money. My impression being not "my parents paid for Stanford" money, but "my great-grandfather's trust fund paid for Stanford's new rowing pavilion" money. She'll happily tell you that the problem with modern society isn't that we sort by intelligence, but that we pretend to sort by intelligence while actually sorting by a particularly vulgar form of striving that she finds aesthetically repulsive.
Her critique goes something like this: The modern PMC striver is a grotesque creature. The Tiger Mom. The résumé-padding, LinkedIn-posting, "crushing it" bugman who measures his self-worth in LeetCode problems solved and whether he made partner by 35. This, she argues, is what you get when you tell everyone that anyone can be elite if they just grind hard enough. You don't get equality. You get a soulless arms race of performative busyness, a cargo cult where the striver apes the surface of elite competence without acquiring the substance.
Better, she says, to return to a system where everyone knows their place. Where the sorting happens early, quietly, and permanently. Where you don't try to be elite, you simply are. Where excellence is demonstrated through effortless grace, not desperate optimization. The boarding school accent. The understated wardrobe that costs more than a car. The ability to discuss Proust and quarterbacks with equal nonchalance. The aristocratic assumption that if you have to ask, you're not one of us, and that's fine. It's a system that rewards being rather than becoming.
From her vantage, this is obviously superior. And I get the appeal. If you're already at the top of the heap by accident of birth, a system that freezes the heap in place is very comfortable. You don't have to worry about some brilliant kid from a refugee camp out-hustling your mediocre son for the last spot at Harvard Medical School. Your son's spot is secure, not because he's particularly gifted, but because he's yours. The system can quietly acknowledge his inherited position without anyone having to say the quiet part out loud. The "genteel" facade is the point, it transforms raw inherited advantage into a question of taste.
This is far from the worst approach. The elites are elites for a reason. That reason is often hereditary. Even total regime change and societal upheaval usually has the dispossessed children of nobility (or the elites) almost inevitably percolate back to the top. This is evident in data from places as far-flung as China, where the grandsons of pre-revolution landlords often outperform their peers. The previous status-quo was bearable, in some ways superior.
However, the aristocratic alternative often ends up parasitic on the very meritocratic machinery it despises. You still need high-g selection somewhere. You still need the engineers, the surgeons, the generals who can think. You can dress that up in tradition and patronage, you can recruit them as client talent, you can offer them a place in the court, but you cannot run a technical civilization on inherited gentility alone. At some point, reality reasserts itself, usually via catastrophe.
But here's where the rubber meets the road: I am that brilliant kid's son. My dad did out-hustle the mediocre sons of privilege. He clawed his way out of a refugee camp because somewhere, a grinding, impersonal system looked at his test scores and said: "This one. This one is worth plucking from the mass and polishing." He wasn't sorted by vibes. He was sorted by a standardized exam that didn't care about his accent, his hand-me-down clothes, or whether he knew which fork to use at a state dinner. It cared whether he could solve the problems in front of him, quickly and correctly.
The "genteel sorting" system that @2rafa prefers would have written him off before he started. He didn't have the right pedigree, the right consonants at the end of his name, the right summer internships. He had the wrong everything except the one thing that actually matters for medicine: the ability to hold a thousand variables in his head while making a decision under pressure. The exam caught that. The "holistic" process would have missed it, distracted by his lack of polish.
So yes, I have a personal bias. I believe in meritocracy because meritocracy is the only reason I'm here, writing this, instead of hauling crates in a warehouse or pulling weeds out of a farm. But my bias aligns with a principle: if we're going to have sorting, and we are, because complex societies require it, then let the sorting be honest. Let it be based on the thing that actually predicts performance, not the cultural markers that predict comfort for the existing elite.
The aristocratic approach pretends it's avoiding Goodhart's Law by refusing to articulate its metrics. But the metric is still there: it's called lineage. It's just a metric that can't be improved upon, only inherited. And while it's true that modern meritocracy is imperfectly gamed (that's what this entire post is about) the solution isn't to replace an imperfect but theoretically climbable ladder with a walled garden whose keys are handed out at birth.
The modern PMC striver is indeed a pathetic figure in many ways. But he's pathetic because he's been lied to. He's been told that credentials are everything, then handed a system where credentials are increasingly just proxies for the ability to acquire credentials. He's been told that growth mindset will make him a doctor, then sorted by an IQ test disguised as the MCAT. His sin isn't striving. His sin is believing the official story, and optimizing for the proxies rather than the underlying reality.
@2rafa's genteel system doesn't fix this. It just makes the proxies even more opaque and even more heritable. It replaces the MCAT with the recommendation letter from your Exeter headmaster. It replaces the LeetCode grind with the unspoken assumption that of course you'll summer at the firm your father's college roommate runs. It removes the last remaining pressure points where someone like my father could punch through.
What we need isn't a return to aristocracy. It's a return to honesty. Acknowledge that g exists, that it matters, and that it's largely heritable. Then build a system that finds the people who have it, wherever they are, however they present. Make the exam harder to game, not easier. Make the credentials less important, not more. And stop pretending that the alternative to vulgar striving is egalitarianism. It's very much not. The alternative is feudalism with better manners.
Sadly, none of this particularly matters in the long-run. The AI will "meritocratically" take your job, and will eventually do it better than you can imagine. My kids aren't going to college. Yours probably won't either. I find that reassuring, in some ways, short timelines taken seriously make a lot of squabbling moot. You can stop running so damn hard, the winner has a jetpack. Isn't that oh, so reassuring?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
"Exploding" is a shorthand for unwarranted errors/catastrophic failure due to criminally negligent quality control.
Plenty of people die on car crashes, but it's much rarer for the death or accident to be due to manufacturer error. The cars? They're almost always fine.
This is in large part due to the fact that cars are highly regulated, and the mechanical failures that do occur being "acceptable" or maybe "expected." The government sets safety standards, the manufacturer meets them, any failure after that has reduced liability. If we think the death toll or damage is too high, then we have the option of swallowing the cost of stricter standards.
Your critique would stand if car crashes were overwhelmingly due to the car falling apart (or exploding) instead of humans being good but not infallible when it comes to operating multi-ton steel vehicles at speeds rarely seen in the ancestral environment.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Watchmen.
It kicked off a copycat trend of deconstructions of the genre, but unlike most of them, it was an actually good movie. Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Being barred out can be obvious, but only when someone is fucked. Otherwise it's similar in presentation to someone being drunk: slurring, swaying, staring at you blankly, taking ages to respond. But less agitated (usually), not flushed. If you can't smell alcohol coming off someone like that, benzos are the safe bet.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
@atelier I can't find a detailed review either, so it's up in the air if I've written one.
The TLDR is that Phoenix Point is incredibly mid. It's just teetering on the edge of worth playing.
The main issue is wasted potential. The ideas behind the mechanics are excellent, it's a simulationist approach, closer to the original XCOM than the new crop, but in 3D.
I particularly enjoy the ballistic simulation, since the RNG simplification of XCOM always slightly annoyed me.
But that's really all it has going for it. The gameplay was grindy, often unfun. The content didn't feel as diverse or interesting as XCOM. The story was so-so.
The balancing wasn't great, but don't listen to me on that now, because the devs implemented a community patch by a group of popular modders that redid the progression. I've seen people claim it's much better.
I'd say I like idea of Phoenix Point much more than actually playing it. I was an obsessive before release, but Julian over-promised and under delivered.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I am pleased that I have achieved a level of fame/notoriety where I don't even have to do the hard work myself.
@100ProofTollBooth I'm afraid I don't think I've added anything to the discussion on Mrs. Good. It was probably someone else.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
It struck me later, but it's worth noting that A is consistently referred to as Mr. A throughout the report.
In the context of a British hospital, that means:
- A senior surgeon, since they shirk the doctor title for ~traditional reasons
- A med student, since interns are called doctors
- Someone who isn't a doctor at all: nurses, ward staff, admin etc
It is very unlikely that he's a senior surgeon. He could be a med student. He might be a particularly dimwitted porter.
Does this make things better or worse? Idk. I would only hope a medical "colleague" would have the common sense not to come up with such farcical excuses, but I've met idiots in the profession. They are overrepresented in both those making and receiving GMC complaints.
That being said, it is still idiotic, regardless of career choice.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I can't really say I have? I know I am comfortable at temperatures where many Scottish women (natives) are freezing, but women feel colder more easily. With the dudes, I don't recall touching tips to see if I'm cold and they're not.
That being said, they probably are better able to tolerate it than I am, it's just rare for it to get cold enough for that to be obvious. Nobody there really wants to hang out outside on the rare occasions it dips below -5° C. Yet I know a dude who did a charity swimming thing when the North Sea was about 2°, which you can't really pay me to even contemplate.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
There's a significant addendum that I discovered on a second trawl through the tribunal records. It's in the Substack version, I didn't bring it over here because I'd have to juggle markdown and HTML.
The gist of it is that there are significant discrepancies in A's accounting of events. Just after the incident happened, he claimed he was physically dragged in and assaulted. This was later watered down to being flashed and inappropriately beckoned.
Call me cynical, but I don't see how even the immediate shock of seeing a dude horny and nude would cause someone to jump to accusing them of physical assault.
I'm not sure what A is getting out of this. Perhaps he just was that genuinely spooked, and decided to escalate pre-emptively. He might have thought that rejecting a senior would come to bite him in the ass (metaphorically), or he might not have been thinking straight (pun not intended).
A hospital toilet... Well, it's a bit of a liminal space. Not quite private, not quite public. This one seemed very low traffic, it seemed to be specific to a floor and surgical theater, so probably closer to private for the purposes of a quick fuck.
While I was willing to give A the benefit of the doubt, his rationale for even being there is ludicrous. Does he expect us to believe that handwashing was all that was on his mind?
The least unlikely explanation, to me, seems to be that A felt genuinely aggravated by the catfishing, lost their cool, and disclosed too much before they were able to calm down and collect their thoughts. Or perhaps they didn't like the surgeon in the first place, he seems like a rather unpleasant chap. But it's all speculation, and I haven't heard anything on the grapevine.
Your moderation log is a mess, and you received a temp ban last time since you won't knock off the low-effort sneering and antagonism. Normally, from a more respectable user, I'd probably let this slide, but I suppose another temp ban has to do.
Please stop.
Edit: Amadan responded at the same time, so we're hashing this out. But in general, if two mods see your post at the same time and feel compelled to act on it, you dun goofed.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
They might be bisexual. They might want kids. They might be severely repressed and in partial denial, or caved to societal or familial pressure. Or all of the above.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
And sometimes, you're bored and slightly drunk in a gay bar, and you whip out a clipboard for an interview. Pure hypothetical, that, couldn't be me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I think you're describing bisexual men. If someone is equally attracted to both genders, but one of them is much easier to grab a hold of than the other, it makes sense to go for them first and then settle for women when you want to get married or go for the more socially acceptable option.
I know the difference between Romanians and Romani. I do not particularly care to litigate whiteness, by "debatably" I only point to the fact that some people do. Besides, the "victim" of this farce specifically claimed that he was catfished with images of a different race, and I doubt he would have said that if he'd expected a Frenchman holding a baguette and got a Pole wielding a... pole.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I learned that night that I was absolutely not gay.
I can only encourage self-discovery.
Now, you have to remember that gay men are satiated! The regularity with which Genghis Khan fucks his bountiful and bodacious harem might start off strong, but will inevitably taper due to boredom. On the other hand, if you suddenly gained access to the lady's quarters, you'd spray seed while the sun shines, or some other incredibly mixed metaphor.
I'm very sure if it was a room of half men and half women, every woman wearing a skimpy towel that was at least as fit and put together as the gay men in my bath house were, would be propositioned 5x a minute.
This is a rare occurrence. Fit gay men can go to a bathhouse whenever they feel like it. Hetero men in the former scenario would make the most of it with a scarcity mindset, gay men might well be bored and there just to do something more interesting than rubbing one out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I can only hope your buddy left a nice tip. That kind of thoughtful approach to hospitality is on the outs.
Now, personally, I'm not "disgusted" by gay male sexuality, at least not in the usual sense. It's more confusing to me, I can no more relate to the desire to have my back blown out by a hairy Greek bull than I can to the idea of getting off to a woman's armpits. I am also deeply jealous, buggers live the straight-man dream, as much sex as they can stomach with an unending cock carousel a single swipe away. A mid gay man gets ten times the action of a top 5% straight dude, with 10% the hassle.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Now, I'll have to ask my (far too many) gay buddies about the finer etiquette of illicit gay romance once I'm back in Scotland, but at the moment, I'm imagining just how I'd die if I tried to convince the average woman on a dating app to meet me in the loo.
On a more serious note, there are tons of places that aren't the woods (the first choice, sadly shot down, read the tribunal minutes) or a hospital toilet. Doctors are allowed to step out of the hospital, mostly. How hard is it to grab a coffee at Costa's after work??? There really are so many better candidates that it just doesn't add up.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I can't find any pictures of him online, so your guess is as good as mine. While Romanians (non-gypsy) are debatably white, I would still assume it's a shock to have be mislead by a photo of some young white dude and then run into a swarthy middle-aged bloke. One flashing you to boot. Probably doesn't trim either, he doesn't sound like the type to bother.
I've never heard of a Gypsy with an M.D.
It could well have fallen off the back of a truck.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Prolonged exposure to cold produces brown fat, which makes you more resistant to cold. I'm much more resilient in that regard after my stint in Scotland.
Still, that only goes so far. Even Eskimo children bundle up, they don't play nude in the snow for prolonged periods.
In my experience, German Shepherds hold up surprisingly well to the local heat. Sure, they won't enjoy the odd day when it reaches 40°, but at that point they're finding refuge in the same place the humans are: in an air conditioned room.
There's a specific type of news story that works like a Rorschach test for whether you believe in the official version of reality that institutions present, or the messy, underground reality of actual human beings. The recent case of Dr. Samuel Stefan, a colorectal surgeon at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, is a perfect example. The headlines are all about a "doctor struck off after stripping naked in a toilet and propositioning a colleague." It's framed as a story about a predatory surgeon and a bunch of shocked, innocent victims.
But if you actually read the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) report with any kind of awareness of how the modern world works, you'll spot a massive hole in the story where a very popular yellow-and-orange smartphone app should be.
The tribunal tells us that Dr. Stefan had been "chatting to a colleague online" even though they were "unknown to each other." They arranged to meet in a toilet. The colleague, we're told, thought this was a "mutually convenient place" and "did not plan to have sex" with Dr. Stefan. When the cubicle door opened to reveal a naked surgeon beckoning him over, the colleague was "shocked, numb, and scared."
Let me just pause here to appreciate the absolutely wild level of benefit-of-the-doubt the MPTS is giving this situation. We're apparently living in a world where the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service believes that two men who've never met, after chatting on some unnamed internet platform, regularly arrange to meet in a hospital toilet cubicle to do... what, exactly? Exchange sourdough starters? Talk about the finer points of laparoscopic mesenteric excision? Compare notes on the hospital's pension scheme?
If you follow the link to the actual MPTS ruling, you'll come across gems such as:
Mr A said that he had met Dr Stefan the day before on XXX and they had chatted by message and had arranged to meet in the Hospital toilets on B level once it had become apparent that they both worked for the same hospital. Mr A said that Dr Stefan had first suggested meeting at night in a woodland area for ‘sexual actions’ but that he had declined this and said he wanted to see Dr Stefan’s face first and did not do sex in public.
Mr A said that he thought they were simply meeting in the toilets to get to know each other and that they would go for coffee afterwards. Mr A stated that it now sounds silly, but he had thought that perhaps in wanting to meet at the toilets, Dr Stefan had wanted to stay hygienic and maybe wanted to wash his hands or for Mr A to wash his hands. Mr A denied that he had any intention of sexual acts whilst at work.
Sounds silly?
Sorry, Mr. A, it sounds retarded. But I'm impressed at the chutzpah. Maybe he wanted to apply mouthwash to your cock too, to be extra safe. You "get to know each other" in public toilets in much the same way that "Netflix and chill" involves ardent attention to the best of the Silver Age of television.
Of course, there was catfishing involved:
Ms G said that Mr A continued to explain to her that, as he started work on that day at 1:30pm, he arranged to meet with the person prior to his shift starting, at the B-Level toilets. However, Mr A then received a text to meet at the C-Level toilets on the third floor of the Hospital from the Main Entrance on A-Level. Mr A told her that he then sent a message to the person to say that he was at the toilets, and one of the cubicle doors inside the toilets then proceeded to open. He then saw a man naked, with scrubs hung up, and playing with himself. The man gestured down with his head, nodding towards his own penis and Mr A understood that this meant for him to do something to the person or watch what he was doing.
Mr A told her that the man looked nothing like the XXX profile, in looks or age. The profile had stated that he was a 28-year-old white male, but that the person in the toilet was at least 10 years older than that and not white. Mr A said that he had seen XXX, panicked, and left the toilets.
Unless the "online platform" was LinkedIn and the "chat" was about a job opening in the proctology department, there's exactly one reason why two men who don't know each other arrange a meeting in a toilet stall. That reason is Grindr. And the main purpose of a Grindr meeting in a toilet stall is definitely not a "mutually convenient" chat.
The tribunal's choice to just accept the colleague's claim of shock at face value suggests one of two things. Either the MPTS members are literally the last three people in the UK who don't know what a hookup app is, or they're putting on some kind of elaborate legal performance where everyone pretends the "victim" was just an innocent bystander who stumbled into the world of public sex by accident.
If you're a man and you arrange to meet another man in a toilet stall after an anonymous internet chat, the "naked" part of the reveal is usually what "meeting" means. The idea that this was some kind of ambush on an unsuspecting guy requires us to believe in a level of innocence that would make a Victorian governess look like a hardened cynic.
And yet, this is the story the tribunal went with. Why?
Maybe it's because the legal system just doesn't have the right words for "misunderstood sexual subcultures." In the official world of the General Medical Council, there are only Doctors and Patients, or Harassers and Victims. There's no category for "Two guys who tried to have a quick hookup during a shift, but one of them got cold feet or thought the other was being way too weird and decided to blow the whistle to save his own ass."
To be totally clear, Dr. Stefan sounds like a nightmare. The report lists other incidents where he tried to kiss colleagues or repeatedly touched the genitals of junior doctors on the wards. Groping people while they're trying to do their rounds isn't a "misunderstanding of subculture." That's just being a sexual harasser. If the tribunal wanted to strike him off for the ward-groping alone, they would've had an open and shut case that didn't require them to pretend a toilet meeting was some kind of platonic coincidence.
But the toilet incident is the one in all the headlines. It's the "deplorable behavior" that the public finds most shocking. And because it's the main charge, the tribunal has to treat the colleague's story as the gospel truth. They have to believe that a grown man walked into a toilet to meet an internet stranger expecting a perfectly normal, non-sexual encounter.
This creates a really weird set of incentives. If you're a junior doctor and you get involved in some risky, slightly unprofessional behavior (like meeting a senior colleague for a hookup in the hospital)*, and it goes badly, your best move is to claim you had no idea what was happening. You have to play the "shocked and numb" innocent to avoid getting caught in the fallout from the other person's misconduct. The tribunal, meanwhile, has to go along with this performance because admitting otherwise would mean acknowledging that NHS hospitals are places where people have complicated, messy, and sometimes illicit sex lives.
The MPTS is obsessed with "public confidence." They mention it specifically: "The Tribunal was of the view that public confidence would be undermined if Dr. Stefan was permitted to practise."
Public confidence is a weird thing. It's rarely based on actual truth, it's based on keeping up a certain appearance. The appearance here is "The Medical Register is a Sacred List of Saints." If the tribunal admitted that Dr. Stefan and his colleague were probably engaging in a common, if risky, gay subcultural practice, it would mess up the appearance. It's way better for "public confidence" to pretend that Dr. Stefan is a lone predator lurking in toilets, jumping out at innocent men who were just looking for a "mutually convenient" place to stand around.
Why did such a murky outcome where neither the primary accuser or the defendant come out smelling of roses collapse into such a binary outcome? We might prefer thinking about it as legibility, in the same sense as Seeing Like A State. The state and its institutions (like the GMC) need the world to make sense in a certain way. A "predatory doctor" makes sense. A "messy situation involving two men, a hookup app, and a complete disaster of professional boundaries on both sides" doesn't make sense. It's too complicated. It raises too many questions about what else is going on in those toilets. It suggests that the hospital isn't just some sterile place of healing, but somewhere humans with hormones and smartphones actually exist.
(And absolutely don't ask about what happens on the beanbags, the ones in the mess)
Watch what happens when you try to tell the truth:
"Dr. Stefan and Mr. A met on Grindr for a bathroom hookup. When Dr. Stefan turned out to be older and a different race than his profile pictures, Mr. A got uncomfortable and left. Later, when Dr. Stefan was under investigation, Mr. A decided to protect himself by claiming he never intended a sexual encounter."
Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?
This is all rather inconvenient. Messy.
So the tribunal goes with the version of reality that makes the most sense in their framework, even if it's the version that makes the least sense to anyone who's lived in a city in the last twenty years. They treat the colleague's "shock" as a medical fact rather than a legal move.
We should also think about the "timeline concern" the panel mentioned. Dr. Stefan was already under investigation for the toilet incident when he allegedly went on to grope people on the wards. This is where my sympathy for the "he was just a guy on Grindr" defense completely disappears.
If you're a surgeon and you've just been caught in a toilet cubicle with your pants down, and the GMC is breathing down your neck, the rational response is to become the most celibate, professional, and invisible person in the history of medicine. You should be the guy who won't even look at a colleague's thigh, much less touch it.
The fact that Dr. Stefan apparently kept making unwanted advances while actively under investigation suggests a level of impulsiveness or lack of reality-testing that's genuinely incompatible with being a surgeon. Surgery is all about extreme impulse control. It's the ability to stand still for six hours and make movements measured in millimeters. If you can't stop yourself from grabbing a junior doctor's genitals while the medical board is literally in the middle of deciding whether to end your career, you probably shouldn't be holding a scalpel inside someone's abdomen.
So yeah, the guy had to go. Getting erased from the register was the only possible outcome. Even if there's no evidence that he was a threat to the general public (or an incompetent surgeon), he certainly was a menace to any nearby twinks, and not a great colleague.
(This is dry British understatement, before someone gets their knickers in a twist)
But I still can't get over the toilet thing.
I keep imagining the tribunal members sitting around a mahogany table, reading the transcript. One of them says, "So, he met a man he didn't know in a toilet stall. Why would he do that?" And another one says, "The witness says it was a mutually convenient place. Maybe the library was full?" And they all nod seriously, recording in the official judgment that this was a believable and logical chain of events.
There's a real cost to this kind of institutional blindness. When we force people to lie about the context of their lives to fit into the "victim/predator" binary, we lose the ability to actually regulate professional behavior effectively. If the NHS wants to stop people from having sex in the toilets, they have to admit that people want to have sex in the toilets. They have to deal with the reality of workplace culture, the stress of the job, and the way technology has changed how colleagues interact.
Instead, we get this whole show. We get a "Digital Reporter" (are there any analog ones left?) writing about "deplorable behavior" like we're still living in 1955. We get a tribunal that pretends Grindr doesn't exist. And we get a medical register that's "protected" from a man who was clearly falling apart, but for reasons the tribunal is too "proper" to actually spell out.
Dr. Stefan didn't show up to the hearing. He offered no remorse and no attempt to fix things. He's basically vanished from the profession, likely on a one way flight to Romania. Maybe he figured there was no point in showing up to a trial where the fundamental premise of the "crime", the toilet meeting, was being discussed in language that had nothing to do with the reality of what actually happened.
In the end, the system worked. A surgeon who didn't have the basic judgment to function in a professional environment was removed. The "public confidence" has been "maintained." But as I read the article, I can't shake the feeling that the only person who's truly "shocked, numb, and scared" is anyone who expects our public institutions to have even a basic understanding of how modern humans actually live.
Queen Alexandra Hospital will keep on functioning. The toilets will stay "mutually convenient" for all sorts of activities. The GMC will keep striking people off using the moral language of the mid-20th century. And the rest of us will keep reading these articles, squinting at the space between the lines where the real world, messy, sexual, and mediated by technology, is hiding in plain sight.
It's a comfortable fiction. It's a world where doctors are either saints or monsters, where toilets are just places for quiet reflection, and where online chatting between strangers is always leading up to a polite conversation about the weather. It's a world that doesn't exist, likely never has, but it's the only one the MPTS knows how to deal with.
*It's worth noting that Stefan was a SHO/Senior House Officer. That's an antiquated but commonly used term, and it absolutely doesn't mean a doctor very high up the totem pole. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't senior to many people, but they'd have to be interns of one flavor or another.
Updated version on Substack, with a few juicy extras.
Thanks :*
I am happy to accept that any legible marker for competence (or perceived competence) will be eventually gamed. It's not like turbo-autists are particularly good at gatekeeping or status games. Normies beat autists, normies are beaten by sociopaths, who are in turn kept in check by autists.
I'm familiar with SBF's performative actions. However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
In other words, I think it's simultaneously true that the world of computers has a higher tolerance for off-kilter behavior and a significant number of people insincerely stealing that culture as their costume!
I'm sure HR and management would prefer someone with people skills who looks presentable, all else being equal. But the sheer tolerance is nigh unprecedented! You'd have to descend to the back of the kitchen with the line cooks before "is warm body" and "can do job" become the prevailing concerns.
Why the initial tolerance? The usual theories that struck me as plausible included a high prevalence of autistic traits, a less client-facing environment, and comparatively legible performance metrics. If you have a code goblin, then the additional latency from running fiber to their segregated basement is worth it. You didn't hire them for their good looks.
But you're right that this creates its own failure mode. When the signal becomes "looking like you don't care about signals," you get poseurs who carefully cultivate dishevelment. The difference, I'd argue, is one of substitutability and testing under load.
In a truly vibes-based profession (consulting, say, or certain flavors of academic humanities), the poseur can coast indefinitely. There's no moment where the rubber meets the road and reveals that beneath the performance there's nothing there. Your PowerPoint looks good, your references are impeccable, and by the time the strategy fails, you've moved on to the next gig.
In programming, the compile button doesn't care about your aesthetic. The production system either works or it doesn't.* Yes, you can hide in a sufficiently large organization, you can take credit for others' work, you can fake it in meetings. But there's still a baseline floor of actual competence required. SBF could fool VCs with his League of Legends schtick, but he still needed actual programmers to build FTX. The fraud wasn't "Sam can't code," it was "Sam is embezzling customer funds." His technical team was apparently quite capable.
The point isn't that programming is immune to status games or that all programmers are autistic savants who only care about code quality. The point is that programming preserves a direct link between competence and output that many other professions have severed. You can fake the culture, but you can't fake the merge request. Well, you can try, but eventually someone has to read your code.
This makes programming comparatively more meritocratic, not perfectly meritocratic. The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing). In contrast, in fully vibes-captured professions, you can game all the way down. There is no compile button. There is no production server that crashes. There's just more vibes, turtles all the way down.
Your point about aristocratic standards being more legible is well-taken, though. Knowing which fork to use is indeed trainable in a way that "act naturally eccentric" is not. But here's where I think we diverge: aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school. What you can't buy (as easily) is the ability to pass a hard technical exam.
The ideal isn't "no standards" or "eccentric standards." The ideal is "standards that correlate maximally with the thing you're actually trying to measure, while being minimally gameable by irrelevant advantages." Standardized testing, for all its flaws, does this better than holistic admissions. A programming interview with live coding, for all its flaws, does this better than "did you summer at the right firm."
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
*I am aware of concerns such as code readability, good practices such as documentation, and the headaches of spaghetti code. But programming is still way closer to the metal than most other professions.
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